History cannot repeat itself, says new CONCACAF president

The damage caused to the reputation of CONCACAF will take time to repair, but new president Vincent Montagliani has confidence in a brighter future.

Charged with heading the body that oversees football in North and Central America and the Caribbean, Montagliani plans to implement a culture shift within the organisation.

CONCACAF is the subject of investigations from FIFA and the US Department of Justice amid allegations of corruption and other forms of misconduct.

And Montagliani told The Guardian: “It is like anything in your life that has had a negative affect or is a tragedy – moving on doesn’t happen overnight.

“It is daily, day-out and day-in. Eventually, you do come out of it, but what we need to remember is that we don’t forget our history.

“We want to make sure that, from a confederation standpoint, history never repeats itself.”

Football governance as a whole has suffered a huge loss of public confidence, with FIFA having itself been at the centre of numerous legal probes and many of its figureheads being implicated in wrongdoing.

“I totally get the scepticism from the public about reform and I think everyone at FIFA gets it,” Montagliani added.

“We are starting to see a bit of humbleness from the sport’s leaders and that is a good thing. The one thing that people have to realise is that as much as there has been a bit of a ****storm here in the past few years, the game itself is in good shape.

“That’s for two reasons: the players and the fans. The fans want to go and see Messi and Neymar and their clubs and those two elements have saved the game.

“At the end of the day it is not guys like me who are going to save the game. What I have got to make sure of is that we serve the players and fans to the maximum so this kind of **** doesn’t happen again.”