ZURICH: Gianni Infantino’s presidential own goal concerning FIFA’s ethics watchdogs has come back to haunt him yet again in the shape of a highly-critical sports governance assessment to the Council of Europe writes KEIR RADNEDGE.

Last spring, at Infantino’s behest, the world football federation’s congress sacked ethics chiefs Cornel Borbely and Hans-Joachim Eckert plus governance chair Miguel Maduro after, the previous year, having removed their independent status.

The FIFA ethics operation, nominally headed by a Colombian prosecutor in Maria Claudia Rojas and Greek judge Vassilios Skouris, has been largely moribund ever since.

In the meantime the International Olympic Committee has also stumbled along in its attempt to find a diplomatic path through the Russian doping scandal.

Two reports from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe was scathing in criticising the “unprecedented loss of trust” in sports governing bodies.

Infantino was criticised directly for sacking independent officials whose inquiries “might have embarrassed him”.

A report on football governance by by former PACE president Anne Brasseur proposed an independent outside panel to oversee “ethics and the integrity of elections.”

She was also critical of Rojas’s ability to meet the demands of the ethics pursuit role because of a lack of command of English and French in which most of the documentation is inevitably frame.

However Brasseur did praise both FIFA and European federation for putting a commitment to human rights at the centre of their missions.

She said: “Steps adopted by FIFA go beyond our demands and may really be a model.”

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