Asian Football Confederation president Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa said he didn’t want to allow the organisation to lapse back into “chaos” as he announced a bid for re-election next year.
The Bahraini royal first took the reins in 2013 when the Asian body was still reeling from a corruption scandal which saw his predecessor, Mohamed bin Hammam, banned from football for life.
At the AFC Congress next April, Sheikh Salman could face a challenge from Saudi Arabia’s Adel Ezzat, head of a new regional bloc, the South West Asian Football Federation.
Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al-Khalifa (centre) looks on after a 2016 AFC Extraordinary Congress in Goa. Photo: AFP
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“I am proud of what we have achieved in that time and I am not ready to leave this organisation into a state of chaos,” Sheikh Salman said in a statement.
“We have all seen what the AFC was before, and we have seen what it looks like now and I hope that we can continue that progress.”
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Sheikh Salman was elected by a landslide in 2013 and completed the last two years of bin Hammam’s term, before being re-elected unopposed to a full, four-year term in 2015.
