By Samindra Kunti
March 28 – The former CEO of the Belgian FA, the KBVB, Steven Martens will become FIFA’s technical director. His move to the world governing body is an interesting if somewhat peculiar appointment in a global role that currently looks to be lacking in definition and objective.
Martens will be tasked to stimulate the game and its growth on a global level. He will also seek to improve the quality of coaching and youth development. The Belgian will work alongside Marco van Basten, who was appointed FIFA’s chief officer for technical development last September.
Van Basten proposed a number of sweeping changes to the game, including the abolishment of the offside rule and the introduction of sin bins, but his proposals to revolutionise the game were met with disbelieve in most quarters of the global footballing community.
Martens will prop up Van Basten in Zurich. The 52-year old was the technical director of the Flemish and British tennis federations before making the move to football. He acted as CEO of the Belgian FA before he resigned in February 2015.
The KBVB netted an all-time high revenue of €60 million in 2014 as the Belgian Red Devils caught the imagination of the public, but an internal audit revealed that the KBVB closed out 2014 with a deficit of €206,000. There were also questionable contracts with Bonka Circus, the production house of Vincent Kompany, and advertising agency Boondoggle. Martens’s policies were alleged to be costly and not transparent.
Local newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws reported that Martens did not resign voluntarily, but was pushed to the exit door by KBVB chairman François De Keersmaecker. Martens received a severance payment of €336,000, the equivalent of his annual salary, according to the report.
Martens never made it a secret that he wanted to climb the footballing ladder and work at international level, but how his perceived management at the KBVB fits the job requirements for his new role at FIFA is questionable.
“There is a plan to decentralise FIFA with tens of regional centers or hubs,” said Martens in an interview with Sporza. “Those hubs will be embedded in the different cultures of the world.”
“Club football in Japan and China is completely different from [club football] in Belgium,” explained Martens. “You have to proceed in a different way, hence the decentralisation. The idea is that I supervise and develop a transcendent philosophy.”
“Over the years, through my job at the English Tennis Federation and as CEO of the KBVB, I have gained a good idea of what a technical director has to do,” said Martens. “In the past I’ve worked to get coaches to a higher level, to fine-tune talent detection systems and so forth.”
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