‘I had set up an evaluation committee to look at what was going on in Asian football and then we got a new AFC president,’ he says of Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al Khalifa, the current president, who won with a resounding majority. ‘Unfortunately, things I had proposed were wrapped up and it became “business as usual”.’
What has happened to the Prince at Fifa since then is not dissimilar. He led a campaign for the release of the Garcia report, an investigation into claims of corruption at Fifa by American lawyer Michael Garcia.
The 430-page report had been submitted to Fifa in September 2014, but two months on, only a summary – which was itself disputed – had been made public. Prince Ali argued, ‘People need to know what has been going on at Fifa.’
Around that time, another scandal hit as it was revealed that Fifa officials received 65 luxury watches between them – each worth £16,000 – during a Fifa Congress in São Paulo, Brazil.
Today, the Prince recalls, ‘I had come back from an executive-committee meeting where the Garcia report was shelved and there was the business of accepting watches in Brazil.