U.S. Soccer Federation President Sunil Gulati has been elected to FIFA’s executive committee, edging Mexican Football President Justino Compean by one vote.
“We welcome the new committee member” FIFA President Joseph Blatter said.
Gulati won 18-17 in a balloting at the congress of North and Central American and Caribbean Football in Panama City.
Gulati’s election was to a four-year term. He joins soccer’s 25-member ruling body at the FIFA Congress on May 30-31 in Mauritius. He will take the seat of fellow American Chuck Blazer, who had held it since 1996. Compean, who had been said to be the leading candidate, received a resounding endorsement of his colleagues in Central America and a group of islands in the Caribbean, including Cuba and Dominican Republic, but it was not enough.
Blazer’s election in 1996 was by a 5-2 vote by the CONCACAF executive committee following the death of Mexico’s Guillermo Canedo.
Gulati, 53, a member of the economics faculty at Columbia University, has been the USSF president since 2006.
Gulati was an executive with the U.S. organizers of the 1994 World Cup, Major League Soccer, and the parent company of MLS’s New England Revolution, and he served on the boards of the 1999 and 2003 Women’s World Cups. He also helped run the failed bid to host the 2022 World Cup.
“The game is growing tremendously in our region both on and off the field, and I hope to do my part to continue to expand the development of the game for both CONCACAF and FIFA,” he said in a statement.
Blazer, the former secretary general of CONCACAF, decided not to run for re-election. Two years ago, he accused then-CONCACAF President Jack Warner of corruption.
Warner and Blazer resigned later in December 2011 and a recent report from a CONCACAF committee accused both of enriching themselves through fraud.