FIFA Outlines Plan to Reform and Road Map for Its Future

Following the arrest of two Executive Committee members by Swiss authorities working on behalf of the U.S. State Department, what remained of the Committee met today to discuss organizational reforms at FIFA. These reforms will be passed on to the FIFA Congress, which will vote on their implementation in February.

Here are some of the key points (for more detail, check out FIFA's release):

Term limits: The President and the new FIFA counsel will be limited to three terms of four years each—a total of 12 years in office.

Separation of political and management functions: The Executive Committee will be replaced by the FIFA Council. The Council will fulfill a strategic role but won't work on day-to-day operations. The motive here seems to be to create a kind of separation of church and state inside FIFA, which would prevent the political/strategic decision-makers from getting their hands dirty in actual management, where there might be more conflicts of interest.

Diversity: FIFA will mandate each Confederation have at least one woman in its Council. Not every Confederation has the same number of Council seats (see below). There are a total of 36 Council positions, meaning women will represent a minimum of 17 percent of FIFA's governing body.

Integrity checks: FIFA will institute "compulsory and comprehensive integrity checks for all members of FIFA's standing committees, conducted by an independent FIFA review committee."

The Committee went on to outline what it's calling its Path Forward. Given what's happened today, many of these goals look downright unachievable: