KEIR RADNEDGE REPORTING —- Harold Mayne-Nicholls has launched the first step on a comeback to mainstream football.
Mayne-Nicholls, who was banned from the game by the FIFA ethics committee in the fall-out from the 2018/2022 World Cup bidding process, is standing for the presidency of the Chilean federation which he led previously for four years from 2007.
He confirmed: “I am very much motivated in running again to become president at Asociacion Nacional de Futbol Profesional. My main goal will be to work together with all the teams to help on the developing of Chilean football.”
Chilean football was plunged into depression when the national team, after winning the Copa America in 2015 and the Copa Centenario in 2016, failed to qualify for the finals of the World Cup in Russia.
That prompted the replacement last January of Juan Antonio Pizzi as national coach with Colombian Reinaldo Reyna from Brazilian club Flamengo.
Planning ahead
Mayne-Nicholls has indicated he would be ready to continue to work with Rueda whom he has known for nearly 20 years. He said: “Rueda is a great coach, very professional. He has done some great work this year in Chile and has had great results with other national teams. My idea, if we win the election, is to work together with Reynaldo and I hope he wants to work with us.”
But first comes the ANFP election next month and, Mayne-Nicholls hopes, a chance to pick up again where he left off after he was ousted by 2011 when, for the 57-year-old, it all went wrong.
Mayne-Nicholls had been appointed to a string of increasingly important roles in South American and world football from the early 1990s before heading FIFA’s bids evaluation committee in 2010 for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
His report included a warning about summer temperatures in Qatar but that was ignored by the FIFA executive committee, most of whose members had other personal commercial and financial priorities.
However he made the fatal mistake – as he has since acknowledged – of trying to negotiate internships for a son and a nephew at the Aspire Academy sport centre in Qatar. Even though Mayne-Nicholls had proposed funding their stays himself, the tangle meant he had overstepped political, diplomatic and ethical marks.
Firstly he was absent from home so long that he was ousted from the Chilean federation leadership by Sergio Jadue. Secondly, he fell foul of the FIFA ethics committee and, in 2015, was banned from the game for seven years. The ban ended his consideration of running for the FIFA presidency in 2016.
Mayne-Nicholls’s public statements of impatience over the ethics process had been adjudged a further breach of regulations though he believed he had been treated derisively, on a personal level, by judge Hans-Joachim Eckert and prosecutor Cornel Borbely.
Suspension reductions
He felt little sympathy for the German and the Swiss when they were sacked abruptly in 2016 by new FIFA president Gianni Infantino.
FIFA’s appeal committee considered his seven-year ban excessive and trimmed it to three years. In July last year CAS reduced the ban still further to two years which meant Mayne-Nicholls had served his time.
Mayne-Nicholls has devoted much of his attention, while out of the mainstream, to his GanamosTodos foundation. Now he wants to make up for lost time on a senior national level. The current president of the Chilean federation, Arturo Salah, has already announced he will not seek re-election.
Jadue is no longer a threat. He is serving a life suspension from football imposed by FIFA after having admitted corruption charges on which he awaits sentencing in the United States in the FIFAGate scandal.
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