Ukraine great Shevchenko is not elected to UEFA ruling committee as Russia cedes place

Ukraine great Andrii Shevchenko failed to win election to the UEFA executive committee on Thursday, the day Russia formally ceded its seat on the decision-making body of European soccer.

Shevchenko, the former AC Milan star and 2004 Ballon d’Or winner, got just 15 votes from the 55 national federations — a shockingly low total for such a high-profile candidate — as one of five candidates for two vacant seats through 2027 on the UEFA ruling committee.

Those two seats were previously held by officials elected from Ukraine and Spain — Shevchenko’s predecessor leading the national federation, Andrii Pavelko, and disgraced former UEFA vice president Luis Rubiales.

Though Spain retained its seat, with Rafael Louzán getting 32 votes, Ukraine’s old seat went to Israel, whose federation president Moshe Zuares got 31 votes.

At the 2024 UEFA congress in Paris, Ukraine was among a handful of member federations who did not fully support a vote allowing UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin to extend his time in office to 2027.

Asked on Thursday if he would uphold his previous pledge to leave in 2027 after 11 years in a job that paid him, Čeferin replied, “It’s not the time to speak about that.”

Russian issues

Russia lost its seat on the 22-member UEFA ExCo because its most senior soccer official, Alexander Dyukov, the chief executive of Russian oil firm Gazprom Neft, did not stand as a candidate to retain his place for the next four years.

A key pending issue for UEFA is when and how to reintegrate Russia teams into international competitions like the World Cup and Champions League and end a ban imposed within days of the military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In 2022, UEFA and FIFA successfully argued at the Court of Arbitration for Sport that continuing to let Russian teams play would invite chaos in their competitions when some countries in Europe refused to play opponents from the country.

“When the war stops they (Russia) will be readmitted,” Čeferin said, restating UEFA’s position on Russian senior teams. A failed UEFA push in 2023 toward letting Russian under-17 teams return provoked a rift in the UEFA executive committee.

Before the voting on Thursday, FIFA President Gianni Infantino told European soccer officials in a keynote speech he hoped Russia would soon be back in international soccer.

“Because this would mean that everything is solved” with peace in the war, Infantino said.

In a separate election for UEFA ExCo seats with four-year mandates, candidates from Estonia and Armenia won.

UEFA salaries

UEFA also now has a second woman on the ruling committee, electing Norwegian soccer president Lise Klaveness by acclamation to a new seat protected for female candidates.

UEFA pays executive committee members a taxable stipend of 160,000 euros ($178,000) each year with vice presidents getting 250,000 euros ($277,000). Those sums are unchanged since 2017, UEFA said in its financial report published on Thursday.

Čeferin got a taxable salary of 3,250,000 Swiss francs ($3.78 million) in the 2023-24 year, the report said. He also gets $300,000 from FIFA as one of its vice presidents.

UEFA secretary general Theodore Theodoridis got a taxable salary and bonus package of 1.9 million Swiss francs ($2.22 million), plus benefits.

UEFA redistributes most of the billions in annual revenue from its club competitions as prize money to the teams taking part, and uses profit from its national team competitions to pay its running costs, pay grants to its 55 member federations and maintain reserves of around 500 million euros ($550 million).

___

AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer