To do so, Saudi Arabia has unilaterally launched a new regional bloc, the South West Asian Football Federation (SWAFF), which is a potential violation of FIFA and AFC rules.
The federation would be made up of members of both the AFC and the Amman-based West Asian Football Federation (WAFF), which groups all Middle Eastern nations together — except for Israel — and is headed by Jordanian Prince Ali bin al-Hussein, a prominent advocate of soccer governance reform.
The heads of founding member associations, including Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and the UAE, were flown, all expenses paid, to Jeddah for the SWAFF launch, offered gifts, and promised funding for soccer development.
SWAFF will be based in Jeddah with Saudi football federation president Adel Ezzat at its head and Saudi sports czar Turki al-Sheikh, a close associate of Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, as its honorary president. If SWAFF takes off, it will weaken the AFC, of which Iran is a prominent member. Iran is unlikely to try to join SWAFF, given that Saudi Arabia would probably veto its membership.
Saudi Arabia’s bid for regional soccer hegemony runs parallel to Donald Trump’s vow to isolate Iran. It makes a mockery of the insistence by global sports governance that sports and politics are separate. The jokers in the Saudi bid are the East Asian nations, with China, Japan, and South Korea in the lead. These countries are powerhouses within the AFC and maintain close economic and diplomatic ties with the Saudis, but have studiously remained on the sidelines of its struggle with Iran. The East Asian nations likely do not want to be sucked into Riyadh’s battles.
Dr. James M. Dorsey, a non-resident Senior Associate at the BESA Center, is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture. BESA Center Perspectives Papers, such as this one, are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family.
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