Soccer great Boban says he's doesn't want UEFA presidency but aims barb at former boss Čeferin

GENEVA — Soccer great Zvonimir Boban says he does not want to succeed his former ally and boss Aleksander Čeferin as president of UEFA.

The European soccer body needed “a real football man,” he suggested on Thursday, in a barb at technocrats who he claimed think they are bigger than the game.

The former Croatia and AC Milan player resigned as UEFA chief of football in January in protest at Čeferin moving to change legal statutes that would let him stay longer in the president's office.

Čeferin later called Boban a clown and his supporters suggested the dramatic exit was positioning to one day challenge for the presidency — a claim denied in an interview with Italian daily Gazzetta dello Sport published on Thursday.

“I don’t have any interest. But a real football man in UEFA is really needed,” said Boban, who previously had a senior role at FIFA under its president Gianni Infantino. He left in 2019 to work for Milan.

“In that sense, I say it with bitterness, having fought for changes at UEFA, like FIFA before that, I was of no use for anything,” Boban said.

UEFA declined to comment on Thursday.

Čeferin and Infantino are both lawyers first elected in 2016 in fallout from turmoil at UEFA and FIFA during American and Swiss federal investigations of international soccer officials. Infantino was previously UEFA general secretary for more than six years.

“Unfortunately for years the soccer technocracy has been all the rage inside the system, depriving it of its values, which instead it should always represent and defend,” Boban told Gazzetta.

“These people think they’re more important than the game, than the players, than the coaches, than the fans and even the actual soccer institutions,” he said.

Boban joined UEFA in 2021 to be a senior advisor to Čeferin, who called his former advisor a clown in February at the UEFA Congress.

“I’m sorry about the way our relationship ended,” Boban said on Thursday, adding they had not spoken since.

Boban resigned in January citing his “total disapproval” of the legal move that would let Čeferin stay in office for 15 years through 2031.

UEFA has a 12-year term limit for its president among anti-corruption reforms passed in response to the criminal investigations that rocked international soccer bodies.

However, Čeferin steered through an amendment approved by UEFA member federations in February that would not count his first three years — technically completing the mandate of predecessor Michel Platini, who was removed from office — against his 12-year limit.

Within hours, Čeferin then pledged he will leave office in 2027 and not seek a final four-year mandate.

Some of UEFA's 55 member federations have since said they support their Slovenian leader staying on.

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AP Sports Writer Andrew Dampf in Rome contributed.