The division of Kuwaiti clubs complicates the Football Association elections

The Kuwait Football Association elections, scheduled for next May 20, are heading towards more complexity, in light of an escalating controversy between clubs over the eligibility of the committee supervising the electoral process, and a division over how to address this issue.

Despite the severity of the dispute, the conflicting parties agree on a basic point, which is that there is a defect related to the eligibility of the current Electoral Commission. However, the essence of the crisis does not lie in diagnosing the problem, as much as it revolves around the mechanism for dealing with it.

The main problem is the absence of a unified legal interpretation that enjoys the consensus of the clubs, which opened the door to different readings of the current situation, reflected in the form of conflicting positions between two camps within the General Assembly.

On the one hand, six clubs – Al-Tadamon, Al-Nasr, Al-Qadisiyah, Al-Arabi, Al-Fahaheel and Al-Salmiya – are demanding the cancellation of all procedures related to the elections, based on the principle of “what is built on falsehood is false,” considering that any electoral process completed under an unqualified committee may lack legitimacy.

In an official statement addressed to the Kuwaiti Federation and its international and Asian counterparts, these clubs called for the formation of a new electoral committee under the direct supervision of the International Federation (FIFA), with the reopening of nominations according to a new mechanism that guarantees the integrity of the procedures from the beginning.

On the other hand, nine other clubs adopt a more flexible position, as they agree on the need to address the committee issue, but they believe that the procedures that were taken previously, especially with regard to accepting nomination applications and opening and closing the door for nominations, do not require complete cancellation.

This group includes Al-Kuwait, Kazma, Al-Shabab, Al-Sahel, Al-Jahra, Yarmouk, Sulaibkhat and Burgan clubs, and has approached FIFA to form a new electoral committee, while maintaining what has been accomplished, in an attempt to achieve a balance between correcting the course and avoiding returning the process to point zero.

This controversy brings to mind the experience of 2018, when a compromise solution was resorted to withdrawing nominations, before the International Federation was approached to form a joint settlement committee from FIFA and the Asian Confederation, which was responsible for supervising the electoral process and calling for it again.

It is worth noting that the door to candidacy for the Football Association elections has been closed after the recommendation of Sheikh Ahmed Al-Yousef, the current president, for the same position.