In mid-March, FIFA announced that Gianni Infantino had been re-elected as president, and UEFA issued a similar statement on Wednesday.

Alexander Ceferin, UEFA president for the third time

Slovenian Aleksandar Ceferin was re-elected president of the European Football Forum on Wednesday for a new four-year term until 2027 during the UEFA Congress in Lisbon, EFE reports.

“It means a lot to me, it’s a great honor and a great responsibility,” Ceferin said immediately after his re-election.

At the age of 55, Aleksandar Ceferin took charge of UEFA in September 2016 following the suspension of Frenchman Michel Platini, and was re-confirmed in 2019.

Now he received his third mandate as UEFA president, aiming to protect its interests, unity, solidarity and sports merits, writes Agerpres.

Since taking office after the crisis that sparked the FIFA corruption case in 2015, Ceferin has raised his profile in Europe and international football in seven years with his actions and strong statements against the “selfishness” he represents of the Super League or “strong condemnation of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine”.

Added to this were spur-of-the-moment decisions, one of which was moving the last Champions League final from St Petersburg to Paris just 24 hours after the Russian army entered Ukraine. Three days later, Ceferin terminated the contract with the Russian energy company Gazprom, with which UEFA has been linked since 2014, and the clubs and national teams of Russia and Belarus were excluded from European competitions.

Ceferin showed the same firmness when FIFA floated the idea of ​​holding the World Cup every two years, which the UEFA president called “a populist project that will destroy football” and, especially in the case of the Super League, the competition. planned by major European clubs led by Real Madrid, FC Barcelona and Juventus Torino, whom he accused of “greed, selfishness and narcissism”.

Oleksandr Čeferin, a footballer and lawyer by profession, born on 13 October 1967 in Grosuplije, about 20 km south-east of Ljubljana, became the seventh president of UEFA on 14 September 2016 in an election that was forced by FIFA sanctions against France’s Michel Platini. , who was re-elected for a third term at the head of UEFA in March 2015. Platini was acquitted last summer by Swiss justice.

Čeferin then defeated the Dutchman Michel van Praag by 42 votes to 13 and from his reserved position became uncontested, being re-elected by acclamation on 7 February 2019.