The last time a newcomer replaced a long-term incumbent as UEFA president that newcomer was one of the best-known names in world football.
That was 2007 and the novice blazer was Michel Platini, still France’s leading goal-scorer, a European Cup winner, a former World Soccer Awards manager of the year and the public face of France’s successful hosting of the 1998 World Cup.
Aleksander Ceferin, the man who replaces Platini as the most powerful football administrator in Europe, on the other hand, used to play for a team of lawyers in Ljubljana, took over his father’s business and has spent the last five years sorting out the Slovenian FA’s finances so it could build a proper training centre.
Having graduated from Ljubljana University with a law degree, Ceferin joined his father’s firm and started to represent sports clients. His first administrative role was with a futsal team, before joining the board of Olimpija Ljubljana, a new team that rose rapidly, like him, to become champions last season.
Ceferin had already moved on to bigger things by then, though, taking over as president of the Slovenian FA, known as NZS, in 2011.
The ex-Yugoslav republic only played its first match in 1992 but a “golden generation” of players, led by Zlatko Zahovic, took the team to Euro 2000 and the 2002 World Cup. Results dipped after that but Slovenia, a nation of just two million people, did reach the 2010 World Cup, where it was the only team England managed to beat.
Although only ranked 59th in the world, there is a sense in European football that Slovenia are on the up again, thanks partly to Ceferin’s leadership.
In May, the NZS opened a new national football centre and the invite list that day should have provided a few clues as to Ceferin’s status within European football. The Slovenian prime minister might have officially been the guest of honour but the presence of newly-elected FIFA president, and ex-UEFA general secretary, Gianni Infantino spoke volumes.
Infantino’s successor at UEFA, Greece’s Theodore Theodoridis, was another high-profile visitor and his gushing comments about NZS’s leadership were indicative of what others were saying about Ceferin more quietly: a consensus-builder, impressive, pragmatic, reform-minded.
In becoming UEFA’s seventh president, he has now been shown a lot of respect and nations big and small will be counting on him to show the leadership he feels he has so quietly and effectively demonstrated already.
