After mingling with club and academy officials at summit, FIFA-AFC delegation set to meet stakeholders.

LAHORE -- As soon as the First Pakistan Football Summit came to a close, the floor was opened to the invitees. For most of those club and academy officials, players and referees, this was the first time they were able to freely meet officials from global football body FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation. They are the ones who have suffered the most due to the long-running crisis in Pakistan football, which has shown no sign of abating despite FIFA having appointed a Normalisation Committee for the Pakistan Football Federation.

With the three-member joint-delegation of FIFA and AFC having arrived in the country for talks over streamlining the future roadmap for the country's football, the Haroon Malik-led PFF NC had asked them to be part of the summit it organised on Tuesday. A planned question and answer session was scrapped and instead those attending the summit at a plush hotel could meet officials from FIFA and AFC. It was here that Bahawalpur Football Academy's Rana Zia, a former Punjab Football Association vice-president, took his chance.

Zia is one of the keen football organisers in the country; a man who's been voicing his concerns over the PFF NC stalling on the election process with the documentation to prove. The PFF NC has launched the Pakistan Football Connect programme in order to conduct club registrations all over the country - the first step towards holding the elections. On Monday, while inaugurating the mobile unit shuttle service in order to reach clubs in far-flung areas of the country, PFF NC chief Haroon had claimed that some legal cases were the biggest impediments in holding polls.

Haroon repeated that at a press briefing that followed the summit but Zia told Dawn on Tuesday that two of those cases are not active anymore. The third case, he added, regarding the bank accounts of the country's football governing body was filed by the PFF NC itself. At the summit, Zia would go on to inform Purushottam Kattel, the Head of the South Asia Unit of the AFC's Member Associations division, about them and earned an invitation for a meeting by the Nepali official on Thursday morning, ahead of the delegation's departure.

On Wednesday, the delegation headed by Rolf Tanner, FIFA's Head of Member Associations Governance, will meet officials previous delegations have met before - the stakeholders of Pakistan football who would be likely candidates in the elections which will be conducted by the PFF NC. They hadn't been invited...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT