DOHA, Qatar, 19 October 2003 — Asian soccer leaders have appointed a task force to lead their fight against the tide of imported foreign matches broadcast on peak-time television and are set to lobby FIFA for support in controlling the problem.
They also plan to demand compensation from the national associations most responsible for flooding their airtime and will approach England, Italy and Spain for financial payments.
Asian Football Confederation (AFC) president Mohamed ibn Hammam said the volume of imported games was damaging the well-being and development of soccer in Asia and particulalry the local and domestic leagues.
Speaking on the eve of this year’s Extraordinary FIFA Congress, he said: “Football is a business now more than anything else and the least we should expect is that we must be compensated by way of payment. He said the main complaint that emerged yesterday, when a meeting of the AFC’s executive committee was followed by an AFC Extraordinary Congress, was that there was “excessive foreign football on Asian television”.
He said the executive had agreed to progress discussions with world governing body FIFA and other relevant governing bodies and he confirmed that a task force, led by AFC general secretary Peter Velappan, had already started work.
Velappan said he understood that each national association had the power to defend its football against this kind of problem enshrined in FIFA’s statutes but added that these mechanisms related to old-fashioned terrestrial television.
The modern system of pay-per-view and satellite TV, expected to be covered by a new set of replacement statutes to be considered by FIFA’s congress this weekend, had seen some Asian countries flooded with imported soccer broadcasts.
