Slovenia’s Aleksander Ceferin has been elected as UEFA’s seventh president at an extraordinary congress in Athens.

• Ceferin is an accomplished lawyer with little record in football before he became head of the Slovenian federation in 2011. In a vote for the UEFA presidency , he hammered the body’s vice president Michael van Praag of the Netherlands 42-13 in what many saw as a call for change.

   

  Ceferin was publicly backed by football powers such as Italy, France and Germany as well as Russia.

• Ceferin has a degree in law and has been working for his family’s law firm developing a special interest in representing professional athletes and sports clubs. He went on to take over his father’s business as company director. He took an interest in local football back in 2005 with KMN Svea Lesna Litjia and has been members of other Slovenian clubs up until he was elected president of the Slovenian FA five years ago.

• Ceferin, who won the vote in Athens ahead of challenger Michael van Praag from Holland, will have to seek re-election before UEFA’s next major event, the 2020 Euros which Ceferin has said should never have been spread across the continent for the first time.

UEFA

The Union of European Football Associations  is the administrative body for association football in Europe, although several member states are primarily or entirely located in Asia. It is one of six continental confederations of world football’s governing body FIFA. UEFA consists of 55 national association members.

Until 1959 the main headquarters were located in Paris, and later in Bern. In 1995, UEFA headquarters transferred to Nyon, Switzerland. Henri Delaunay was the first general secretary and Ebbe Schwartz the first president.