Gianni Infantino elected Fifa president after Zurich election

Greg Dyke, the Football Association chairman who had backed Infantino, hailed him as a "straightforward guy" whose victory was a new start for Fifa. Dyke said that England would now consider bidding for the 2030 World Cup, The Guardian reports.
However, the Swiss-Italian Uefa general secretary, who entered the race only when his boss Michel Platini was suspended then banned for six years for accepting a "disloyal payment" from Blatter in 2011, faces an uphill task to overhaul Fifa's battered reputation.
Infantino, who spent €500,000 of Uefa funds touring the globe in the run-up to the election, triumphed over the controversial Asian Football Confederation president, Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, in the second round of voting by 115 votes to 88.
The Bahraini had assumed his presidential bid would end in a coronation when he resolved to stand following Platini's withdrawal in October, but his campaign has been marred by strenuously denied allegations over human rights breaches and vote-buying in previous elections.
After Infantino took a narrow 88-85 lead in the first round of voting, with the Jordanian Prince Ali bin al-Hussein in third place on 27 and the French former Fifa executive Jérôme Champagne in fourth with seven, he seized the initiative. Infantino's energetic campaign, together with promises to more than double development money dispensed to Fifa's 207 federations to $5m over four years, won the day.
"I want to be the president of all of you. I travelled through the globe and I will continue to do this. I want to work with all of you to restore and rebuild a new era where we can put football in the centre of the stage," Infantino told the delegates following his victory. "Fifa has gone through sad times, moments of crisis. But those times are over." Later, he told the media: "We enter now a new era. We'll restore the image of Fifa and make sure everybody will be happy with what we do."
His pitch also included a boast that he had vastly increased Uefa's revenues, promising to do the same for an organisation now staring at a $550m financial black hole. "It's your money, not the money of the Fifa president," he had told the delegates to applause. "The money of Fifa has to be used to develop football."
The 45-year-old, who has been at Uefa for 15 years and general secretary for the past seven, promised to "bring football back to Fifa" but must first lift it off its knees following eight months of chaos and crisis. Ongoing US and Swiss investigations are understood to have a long way to run.
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