Gianni Infantino elected after a second round of voting
Gianni Infantino, a top administrator in European soccer, was elected president of FIFA, the sport’s global governing body, in an election on Friday.
Mr. Infantino will replace Sepp Blatter, who announced his resignation just days after winning a fifth four-year team in May amid a growing corruption crisis.
It was a surprising victory, as many experts predicted Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa of the Bahrain Royal Family would win the election which featured five candidates.
In his victory speech, Infantino said, “I told you I went through a journey, an exceptional journey and a journey which made me meet many fantastic people – many people who love football and believe in football, and many people who deserve FIFA to be respected.”
Infantino won election during the second round of voting after the first round yielded no candidate with the required 138 votes, a two-thirds majority of the 207 countries eligible to cast a ballot. After that round, Infantino had 88 votes and Sheikh Salman had 85. The two other candidates to receive votes – Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan and Jerome Champagne of France – finished with 27 and seven votes, respectively.
Blatter, the previous president of FIFA who first took office in 1998, was ineligible for the election because he had been banned from the organization by the FIFA Ethics Committee for eight years, a sentence that was later reduced to six years.
