Veteran politico Villar keeps control in Spain winning election for 8th term

Angel Maria_Villar_President_of_the_Spanish_Football_Federation

By Andrew Warshaw

May 23 – The great survivor has done it again. Angel Maria Villar, one of the last remaining members of FIFA’s old guard, has been re-elected as head of the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) for the eighth consecutive time after standing unopposed.

Now 67, Villar, who received 112 votes in the RFEF’s general assembly with 11 abstentions and six spoiled ballots, will continue in the role until 2020, having been first elected in 1988.

“We have received huge endorsement which has brought us an undeniable victory. We have worked and won cleanly, it is a legitimate triumph, ratified by a strong majority,” Villar, who has ruled the federation for 28 years, told reporters.

Villar, a FIFA and UEFA vice-president, has presided over the most successful era in the history of Spanish football, with the national team winning back-to-back European Championships in 2008 and 2012 and their first World Cup in 2010.

Yet to suggest there is no opposition to the canny and seemingly untouchable lawyer is way off line. Indeed, his reign has been dogged by controversy both at domestic level and within FIFA where he has fallen foul of the ethics process.

Villar’s former secretary general Jorge Perez decided not to challenge him for the RFEF presidency, instead reportedly threatening to take Villar to Spain’s highest sports court over alleged irregularities in the election of the RFEF assembly.

On the international political front, while other top FIFA bigwigs have seen their careers come crashing down, Villar was fined CHF 25,000 by FIFA’s ethics committee in 2015 for failing to cooperate with an investigation into the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar respectively.

Tellingly, he led the Portugal/Spain campaign which ultimately failed dismally amid claims that a  €1.2 million government grant was used for development projects in the Caribbean.

Earlier than that, back in March 2014, Villar was exposed by this website and two other media organisations as one of conservative old guard who allegedly tried and failed to shut down the notorious Michael  Garcia corruption probe whilst it was in full swing.

Despite all this, Villar took on the interim UEFA presidency for roughly a year following Michel Platini’s suspension until the election of Aleksander Ceferin. At one point he had been a candidate himself but never really stood a chance and pulled out, his resistance to reform having clearly worked against him.

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