By Andrew Warshaw
October 4 – Nigeria’s Amos Adamu, kicked out of FIFA for allegedly selling his World Cup vote, takes his case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) today in a final attempt to overturn his three-year ban.
Twenty-four hours after it was announced that Mohamed Bin Hammam’s attempt to be reinstated as head of Asian football following the cash-for-votes scandal was dismissed by CAS, Adamu is seeking relief at sport’s ultimate appeals body.
Despite strong evidence against him, Adamu remains confident he will be cleared of the bribery charges that saw him banned by FIFA’s Ethics Committee.
“He [Adamu] is not the one to give up that easily,” a source close to the former West African Football Union (WAFU) President was reported as saying.
“Until the final hearing on the matter, nobody should write him off completely from returning to football.”
Unlike Bin Hammam, who has been replaced as acting head of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) by China’s Zhang Jilong, Adamu still has considerable support from within African football.
Efforts to replace him within the hierarchy of Confederation of African Football (CAF) with Ibrahim Galadima (pictured), a former President of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFA), failed at the governing body for African football’s congress earlier this year in Khartoum, Sudan.
Galadima polled just five votes, with Adamu’s role remaining unoccupied through 2013.
Adamu was the first FIFA official sanctioned for bribery last November following reports of alleged vote trading in the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding contests.
He had been on the Executive Committee of both FIFA and CAF and his case sparked a wave of further suspensions among FIFA powerbrokers, which rocked the organisation’s credibility to the core.
Later this month, FIFA President Sepp Blatter will announce his eagerly awaited reforms to clean up the game after the worst crisis in the international controlling body of football’s history.
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