Ukraine great Shevchenko is not elected to UEFA ruling committee as Russia cedes place

By Canadian Press on April 3, 2025.

Ukraine great Andrii Shevchenko failed to win election to the UEFA executive committee on Thursday, the day Russia formally ceded its seat on the decision-making body of European soccer.

Shevchenko, the former AC Milan star and 2004 Ballon d’Or winner, got just 15 votes from the 55 national federations as one of five candidates for two vacant seats through 2027 on the UEFA ruling committee.

Those two seats were previously held by officials elected from Ukraine and Spain — Shevchenko’s predecessor leading the national federation, Andrii Pavelko, and disgraced former UEFA vice president Luis Rubiales.

Though Spain retained its seat, with Rafael Louzán getting 32 votes, Ukraine’s old seat went to Israel, whose federation president Moshe Zuares got 31 votes.

At the 2024 UEFA congress in Paris, Ukraine was among a handful of member federations who did not fully support a vote allowing UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin to extend his time in office to 2027.

Russia lost its seat on the 22-member UEFA ExCo because its most senior soccer official, Alexander Dyukov, the chief executive of Russian oil firm Gazprom Neft, did not stand as a candidate to retain his place for the next four years.

A key pending issue for UEFA is when and how to reintegrate Russia teams into international competitions and end a ban imposed within days of the military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In 2022, UEFA and FIFA successfully argued at the Court of Arbitration for Sport that continuing to let Russian teams play would invite chaos in their competitions when some countries in Europe refused to play opponents from the country.

Before the voting on Thursday, FIFA President Gianni Infantino told European soccer officials in a keynote speech he hoped Russia would soon be back in international soccer.

“Because this would mean that everything is solved” with peace in the war, Infantino said.

In a separate election for UEFA ExCo seats with four-year mandates, candidates from Estonia and Armenia won.

UEFA also now has a second woman on the ruling committee, electing Norwegian soccer president Lise Klaveness by acclamation to a new seat protected for female candidates.

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

Graham Dunbar, The Associated Press

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