Change of leadership at the top of the largest sports association in the world: The Bundestag of the German Football Association has elected Bernd Neuendorf as the new president.
Bernd Neuendorf is the new President of the German Football Association. The 60-year-old won the majority of the delegate votes at the 44th DFB Bundestag in Bonn. He succeeds Peter Peters and Rainer Koch, who also ran for election and who acted as acting directors of the association last year after Fritz Keller resigned as DFB President.
New DFB President Bernd Neuendorf was considered a favourite
Bernd Neuendorf has been President of the Mittelrhein Football Association since 2019 and was previously State Secretary in the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport. The studied political scientist and sociologist and trained journalist is considered a career changer in the football business. In the internal logic of the DFB, he is assigned to the amateur camp and was considered a favorite for the presidential post in the association before the election due to the distribution of votes in the Bundestag.
The DFB Bundestag consists of 262 voting delegates. They include the members of the DFB Presidium and the DFB Board of Directors as well as delegates from the regional and state associations and the league association. It meets every three years, which also corresponds to the term of office of the DFB President.
With around seven million members, the DFB is the largest sports association in the world and has been criticized for years, mainly because of its sometimes non-transparent business practices and the promotion of the commercialization of football. In the past, tax investigations and the public prosecutor’s office have repeatedly approached the DFB headquarters in Frankfurt am Main. Neuendorf’s predecessor Fritz Keller resigned in May 2021 after comparing his deputy Rainer Koch to former Nazi judge Roland Freisler.
You can read more about the election of Bernd Neuendorf as the new DFB President here shortly.
DPA news agency
Source: Stern
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