Paris (AFP)
The elections for the presidency of the French Football Federation, originally scheduled for December, have been postponed to March 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, the FFF confirmed on Wednesday.
"The elections for the FFF and the High Authority for Football, which were originally scheduled to take place on December 12 in Paris, have thus been postponed to March 13, 2021," it said in a statement.
The executive committee of the federal authority took this decision "in order to respond to the calendar difficulties posed by the coronavirus epidemic", the text specifies.
"We are dropping the elections a bit, we will talk about them again at Comex to surely set new dates since we have until March 31 (2021), and not in December, for the current mandate," said the March 27 President Noël Le Graët in an interview with AFP.
The 78-year-old leader, who became head of the FFF in 2011 and re-elected for a second term in March 2017, did not indicate whether he wished to apply for his succession.
In fact, the whole cycle of elections in French football, which concerns in chronological order the districts, the leagues and then the Federation, is turned upside down by the health crisis.
Those concerning the steering committees of the 91 districts, initially scheduled for June, will be held between September and December 20, says the FFF. "The elections for the steering committees of the 22 leagues to be held thereafter must be organized before January 31, 2021".
"This postponement of the electoral calendar of the FFF and of amateur football will make it possible to guarantee the good progress of the elections, on the legal and democratic level, from the deposit of the lists, the electoral campaigns until the votes", assures the Federation in the press release.
© 2020 AFP