By Samindra Kunti
August 17 – The president of the Bolivian Football Federation (FBF) Marco Peredo resigned on Wednesday, citing “the carnival” that persists in Bolivian football and the resistance to his presidency as his motives.
“Do whatever you want with football,” said an agitated Peredo (pictured) at a press conference in Santa Cruz. “I’m going to play somewhere else, where people want to play fair and I’ve already decided what I’m going to do about my life in football. It is not worth it. This, this is a carnival.”
Peredo added that he had assumed the presidency of the league and the FBF “imbued with a firm conviction that football had to change” and “without any personal interest.” In 2016 he became the FBF president in the wake of the FIFA scandal, but failed to foster change in the Bolivian game. He had succeeded Rolando Lopez on an interim basis.
Last May FIFA had supervised an extraordinary congress of Bolivian football administrators to implement historic reform of the FBF and unify the game in the country, which suffered from corruption problems.
Peredo’s resignation was triggered by the suspension of the Clausura competition over a conflict between the guild of football players and seven clubs that owe millions of dollars in salaries to dozens of players.
“We are playing with the feelings of millions of citizens in the country, I am not frustrated or bitter, because I have done everything I could do this year, but working has been difficult,” said Peredo. “There was a lot of opposition to unifying football, to the democratisation and there are people who oppose that and who live from that.”
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