Election for nat’l football body chief rescheduled for Feb. 26

The election for president of the national football governing body, postponed multiple times due to procedural issues, has been rescheduled for Feb. 26.

The Korea Football Association (KFA) announced late Monday night that its new election management committee had settled on the new date after its first meeting held earlier in the day.

Further details of the new election day will be determined following the committee’s next meeting Saturday, the KFA added.

All three candidates will remain in the race: Chung Mong-gyu, who is going for his fourth term; Huh Jung-moo, former head coach of the South Korean men’s national team; and Shin Moon-sun, former player and television commentator who teaches sports data analysis at Myongji University in Seoul. The KFA said it will not accept any new candidates.

Chung’s status had been up in the air recently, with the deadline approaching for the KFA to act on a demand by the sports ministry to penalize Chung based on the findings of the ministry’s monthslong probe into the KFA’s operations last year. However, the KFA announced Saturday it had filed an administrative suit at the Seoul Central District Court on Jan. 21 to nullify the ministry’s demand to at least suspend Chung.

While awaiting the court’s ruling, the KFA has decided to withhold its decision on Chung and allowed him to stay in the election. If Chung had been suspended, he would have been ruled ineligible.

The election was set to take place Jan. 8 but was postponed on the eve of that day when the Seoul Central District Court granted an injunction filed by Huh to stop the proceedings. Huh had raised issues with the composition of the KFA’s election management committee and questioned its impartiality, and also claimed the KFA deliberately tried to exclude a certain group of voters from the electoral college.

On Jan. 9, the KFA announced the election would be held Jan. 23, but both Huh and Shin said they had never agreed to the new schedule. The election was then postponed indefinitely when all eight members of the election management committee resigned Jan. 10.

The new election committee is made up of 11 individuals: three former officials of the National Election Commission (NEC), three from the legal field, three from the media and two from academia. Park Yeong-soo, former NEC secretary-general, was named the head of the committee Monday.

Per KFA rules, at least two-thirds of the election committee members must be independent figures who have no affiliation with the football body. The committee said 10 of its 11 new members were brought in from the outside, based on recommendations by organizations with no ties to the KFA.

The electoral college will be assembled in a random draw and will include officials of regional football bodies, active players, coaches and referees. The pool will be made up of those who had signed their privacy consent forms during a three-week period that ended Sunday.

When granting Huh’s injunction request in January, the Seoul court pointed out that the KFA committee had violated its election rules by asking people selected for the electoral college to sign their privacy forms instead of asking all eligible voters to sign them before the random draw.

The election committee said it picked Feb. 26 out of consideration for the match schedules of players, coaches and officials.

The new K League season kicks off Feb. 15, and the league stage for the Asian Football Confederation Champions League Elite tournament will resume next Tuesday and wrap up Feb. 19, with the knockout stage set to start March 4.

All three candidates on Tuesday welcomed more clarity to the election schedule and said they all hope for a clean election.

Chung thanked Park, the former NEC official, for taking the reins of the election committee.

“I expect the new committee to address issues raised by the court last month and to successfully run a fair election,” Chung said in a statement. “As the incumbent president and a candidate, I feel responsible for the trouble caused by the delay of the election. I’d like to ask all the candidates to respect the due process and to refrain from slandering one another and spreading fake information to delay the election any further. That way, we can resolve outstanding issues in Korean football and normalize the KFA.”

Huh also called for “transparent and impartial” management of the election process.

“As everyone knows, the previous election committee was only built to help Chung Mong-gyu win his fourth term, and it was dissolved before finishing its business. It created an administrative vacuum at the KFA,” Huh said. “The new election committee must not be about any particular individual. To ensure the development of Korean football, it must make sure a candidate supported by the people and those working in football will be elected in a transparent and fair vote.”

Shin said the new election committee had shared with him the pool of voters eligible for the electoral college, whereas the previous committee refused to release that information.

“I welcome the committee’s willingness to communicate with candidates,” Shin said. “I will do whatever I can to cooperate with the committee to ensure a fair election.”