By Andrew Warshaw
May 17 – FIFA’s first ever female secretary general, Fatma Samoura, has vowed “to help football restore its tarnished image” and says she should be given time to make her mark despite having negligible footballing experience.
Samoura was appointed by the FIFA Council last week on the personal recommendation of president Gianni Infantino and is due to start work next month after a career as a senior United Nations diplomat. She was the only candidate put forward to the council for the job.
FIFA’s new Senegalese second in command will need to bring all those diplomatic skills to the table but says she intends to grasp the task with both hands.
“My goal is to support the programme of president Gianni (Infantino) and to help football restore its tarnished image,” Samoura told AFP. “I bring 21 years of experience in the private sector and the UN in terms of good governance and transparency, and the obligation to make the different federations and FIFA accountable.”
“To those who speak of my lack of experience, I say give me the time to prove myself,” she added. “We must try to restore football to what it was, the most popular sport that breaches social divides. And one of the things I am going to try to do is bring greater support to women’s football.”
Samoura will take up her post by mid-June after undergoing an eligibility check administered by FIFA’s independent review committee. She revealed she met Infantino, who was appointed to succeed Sepp Blatter in February, for the first time in November last year.
“I was in Madagascar at the time and it was during a match between Madagascar and Senegal,” in a qualifier for the 2018 World Cup, she said. “At the time he was not yet a candidate for the FIFA presidency and was preparing Michel Platini’s campaign. After dinner, somebody told me he had apparently said: ‘If one day I am president of FIFA this is my secretary general’.”
“When he was elected it was me who went to talk to him. I sent him a mail and he called me. He then offered the post to me…He made me an offer and he convinced me!”
A mother of three, she speaks fluent English, Spanish, French and Italian as well as the indigenous language of Wolof. Tokyo Sexwale, the South African human rights icon and politician who was a candidate for the FIFA presidency before pulling on the day, said she had enormous management expertise and that giving her the job was not simply a public relations exercise.
“She’s someone who has worked in the system of the United Nations and understands what is required in terms of an executive,” Sexwale told AFP. “The fact that she is a woman is not number one for me.”
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