Apathy, manipulation and intrigue seem to define Pakistan football.
While players and fans of football continue to rue the state of the sport in the country despite its undoubted popularity, the machinations in its governing body, the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF), paint a picture of those at the helm working for their own personal interests rather than for the good of its main stakeholders.
But now there seems to be an unholy nexus between such interests and parts of the global football governing body Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) as well.
FIFA has suspended the country twice in the last decade alone — including over interference in the PFF elections. Eventually, the world governing body resorted to a stopgap solution of appointing a “Normalisation Committee” (NC) in 2019. It was given the explicit task to hold the PFF elections transparently, while managing football activities, including conducting regular domestic football tournaments, till the appointment of a new governing board.
The PFF has also failed on the administrative front, with elections for the new governing body not held in the three years since Malik was appointed to lead the stopgap NC.
One of the elections conducted by the stopgap NC, for the referee’s association, remains disputed. In another controversial decision, the PFF allowed newly registered clubs the right to vote — against the PFF Constitution — in the ongoing district elections. These clubs were scrutinised as part of PFF’s extensive programme to register clubs, the long-delayed first step towards holding elections. A novel way of voting has also been introduced for the district elections, with votes to be cast through WhatsApp, which has raised further alarm among the footballing community.
There’s a method to the madness, however. Under the PFF constitution, registered clubs vote for district associations, which in turn vote for the provincial associations. Three nominees each from the four provinces and one from Islamabad become part of the PFF Executive Committee (ExCo). The ExCo, comprising a total of 26 members, votes for the president. Other relevant associations and groups, like that of the referees, also have one vote as do the eight departmental teams and the club that wins the women’s national championship.
With a simple majority required to win, support from the provinces and Islamabad alone can tip the election in a candidate’s favour.
With clubs — that had voting rights previously, when the last PFF election was held in 2015 — set to vote for the stakeholders who have been vying for power for the past several years, detractors have accused the NC of manipulating the still-to-be-held elections by including newly registered clubs.
The extent of the control the Haroon Malik-led governing body holds over the election has resulted in concerns over transparency. In the meantime, the government has written to FIFA on multiple occasions, most recently in December, calling for a change in the NC over its failure to hold elections within the prescribed time. Despite the vociferous complaints, FIFA gave Haroon Malik and his team another nine-month extension, in March this year.
To understand why Malik continues to enjoy FIFA’s unwavering support and patronage, we have to rewind back to a year before Malik’s appointment as the NC chairman in January 2021. In retrospect, this provided the first glimpse of what was at play and how FIFA was committing the biggest foul on Pakistan football.
Malik’s league plans, largely of a closed franchise league, only came to light after he was forced out of the PFF Headquarters, by a group of football officials led by the former court-elected PFF president, who claimed the NC was doing nothing on the election front.
THE MOVERS AND SHAKERS OF PAKISTAN FOOTBALL
On a cold December afternoon in 2019, Haroon Malik posed for a picture outside the FIFA headquarters in Zurich. “Discussing Pakistan football! Invigorating meetings, exciting times!” he captioned the picture on X, then known as Twitter. The discussions that took place in the Swiss city on that day would shape the future of Pakistan football. Plans for it had been set in motion months before.
In August 2019, a month before FIFA first announced the NC for the PFF, global professional services firm KPMG had begun reaching out to people with knowledge of Pakistan football. During its initial correspondence, the KPMG Football Benchmark department said that it had started “an exciting project on football in Pakistan for a prominent client.” When discussions began, it emerged that it wanted to discuss the holding of a franchise league in Pakistan.
Around that same time, a Facebook page was launched by the name of Football Club Pakistan (FCPK). Those working for the page aimed at providing football updates and were employed by media communications company Starcom MediaVest Group Pakistan — the Pakistan branch of Starcom, which is headquartered in Chicago and which, in turn, is a subsidiary of global marketing and communication giants Publicis Groupe.
FCPK was Malik’s first foray into Pakistan football. Some 15 months after FCPK was launched, the Canadian-Pakistani tech entrepreneur was named the chairman of the PFF Normalisation Committee, following the resignation of his predecessor Humza Khan. But it is what Malik was doing in those intervening months that made his appointment one that raises issues of conflict of interest.
A FOOTBALLING CHESSBOARD
Back in 2019, leading the discussions on that “exciting project on football in Pakistan” was KPMG’s former sports advisory manager, Yacine Sosse Alaoui. Alaoui has since left KPMG, joining FIFA as its business intelligence manager in September 2020.
But a little over six months earlier, in February 2020, Alaoui and Andrea Sartori, the head of KPMG Football Benchmark, had accompanied Malik for a trip to Kuala Lumpur, where they met with officials from the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) about what Malik called “discussing opportunities and ideas for Pakistan football.” Malik had not been named as head of the NC at that time.
“Haroon Malik came to the AFC in 2020 with people from KPMG,” a source in Asian football’s governing body told Eos. “Discussions with the marketing department centred on a competition.”
When the AFC was asked about that visit, a spokesperson of Asia’s football governing body termed it “a courtesy visit.”
In fact, it was the December 2019 meeting in Zurich that had reportedly set up discussions with the AFC. The FIFA headquarters is a seven-storey building: two floors above ground and five underground. It was a closed-doors secret meeting on one of those levels that would script the future of Pakistan football.
In alleged attendance alongside Sartori, Alaoui and Malik were Mario Gallavotti, the Italian lawyer who heads FIFA’s independent committees; Romy Gai, the chairman of London-based sports industry operators AWE International Group; and Pakistani advertising mogul Raihan Merchant.
The proposal was laid out for holding a franchise league in Pakistan with Gallavotti and Gai — who would in 2022 become FIFA’s chief business officer — on board. Their interests remain unknown, but the talk in FIFA at that time was “that something big was going to happen in Pakistan football.” Sartori, Gai and Gallavotti are all Italian.
When FIFA was approached for comment in 2022 regarding that meeting, its spokesperson gave a stern reply: “Please be informed that there are no updates regarding the matter you’ve mentioned.”
The world football body did not comment on whether Gallavotti and Gai were part of that meeting, although they did not deny it either. Meanwhile Merchant, when contacted by Eos, denied his presence at the meeting.
A source close to the discussion, however, says otherwise: “They [Gallavotti and Gai] were really pushing for the league to happen,” the source told Eos. “The purpose of the meeting seemed to push for its endorsement.”
It was clear that Malik and his associates didn’t want to come out as rebels. They wanted to hold the league with the PFF’s blessings, as part of the domestic calendar, but also as sole holders of all rights for the event. Football was going to be the third sports discipline Z2C Limited — the holding company for ventures owned by Merchant, which also has Starcom MediaVest Group Pakistan, now Brainchild Communications — was going to organise a league for.
Malik has been an executive director at Z2C since January 2019 — a position he still holds. Merchant and Malik also are alumni of the same university.
Malik’s FCPK would become the ideal social media tool to propagate the league. Meanwhile, Z2C also had BSports — a sports app that combined social and data feeds with a livestream of sports events. It also had digital rights for the Pakistan Super League.
The question being raised is whether Malik’s interest is in putting the affairs of the PFF in order as head of the NC or to push forward the franchise league he is invested in.
FIFA’S ROLE
While giving another nine-month extension to Haroon Malik and his team till March 2024 — originally the NC had been appointed in September 2019 till June 2020, while Haroon was appointed the NC chairman in January 2021, for a nine-month period — FIFA had warned of possible sanctions being imposed if PFF elections weren’t held by then. But despite little headway being made and multiple deadlines being missed, FIFA has once again extended its mandate till December 2024.
“Of course, it’s those links high up in FIFA,” one source close to the matter tells Eos. “With Haroon there, the franchise league plan stays alive.”
In the meantime, most former Starcom employees are now working for the PFF, a simple LinkedIn search will show. Hasnain Haider, PFF’s head of digital media, was a project manager at Starcom. PFF’s football performance analyst, Irtaza Hussain, was community manager for FCPK at Starcom. PFF’s current creative manager, Haider Ali, was formerly at Z2C.
While the NC has been unable to pay dues to players of the national teams because of an audit objection raised by FIFA, the employees continue to get paid by funds coming in from the global football body. “The PFF is effectively being run by Starcom,” a source in the NC tells Eos. “The groundwork is being laid for the franchise league they want to hold.”
Malik, though, hasn’t been the only one looking to organise a football league in Pakistan. UK-based TouchSky Group, Pakistan Super League (PSL) franchise Peshawar Zalmi owner Javed Afridi and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa football official Shahid Shinwari have all publicly stated their intentions of doing so as well.
TouchSky, later rebranded as Global Soccer Ventures and now repackaged as Pakistan Football League, is set to unveil its franchise league next month. It has set a date of November 1 to hold its franchise league which, contrary to the brochures it has been sending out, does not have the endorsement of the English Premier League or its clubs.
But with the PFF having the final say over any league, Haroon’s position as the NC chief, which will see him hold elections for a new executive committee of the country’s football governing body, means there is a conflict of interest, even if he says that FIFA doesn’t think there is any.
“Anyone associated with football, anywhere in the world, would have some stake in the game,” Haroon told Eos in April 2021.
“It is normal, and natural. You cannot have someone who knows nothing about football, nothing about the market that they are operating in, and be responsible for football. Employers determine if conflict of interests are potentially troublesome. FIFA determined that my commercial interests have no conflict with this role [as NC chief]. If FIFA is okay, then that is the final word.”
In fact, FIFA did not specifically comment on Haroon’s commercial interests having a conflict with his role, but its spokesperson said that “in line with standard procedures, all members of the Normalisation Committee were subject to stringent eligibility checks.”
The spokesperson did not disclose whether FIFA had knowledge of Haroon’s elaborate plans of holding a league, or whether they were investigated during the eligibility checks, but added: “FIFA has no further comment at this stage.”
TAKING INSPIRATION FROM THE PSL
In 2015, Z2C helped launch the PSL. Its affiliate, Blitz Advertising, was a broadcasting, live-streaming and a marketing partner for the league. But the partnership fell apart due to a legal dispute in 2020, with the Pakistan Cricket Board claiming victory in its arbitration proceedings against Blitz over rights fee payments related to the PSL two years later.
Blitz has long harboured hopes of holding a football league on similar lines. With football being an untapped market in Pakistan, with massive potential returns for the initiators, they aren’t the only ones.
For some time, Badar “Bobby” Refaie, the former director marketing of the PCB, seemed to be driving forward Z2C’s football ambitions externally, even though he brushed it off as small talk in a conversation during a PSL match in 2021. “They just can’t get it together,” he said. Badar has been involved in almost every sport — from organising a tour of hockey legends to Pakistan to the National Volleyball Championships.