KARACHI, June 4: Pakistan now has two representatives on FIFA committees.

This came after Pakistan Football Federation (PFF) official Syed Nayyar Haider’s group was elected to the Disciplinary Committee of the world’s football governing body in the recent FIFA Congress in Mauritius.

Nayyar follows in the footsteps of PFF president Faisal Saleh Hayat who is a member of FIFA’s Strategic Committee and has also served on the Disciplinary Committee.

Nayyar’s group was headed by Football Association of Singapore (FAS) vice-president Lim Kia Tong who replaces Venezuelan Rafael Esquivel as the deputy chairman of the Disciplinary Committee.

They received an overwhelming majority of the votes — 198 out of 209 — from FIFA’s member countries.

“To have been endorsed by the majority of the member associations gives us a lot of pride,” Lim said in a statement.

The committee is the busiest and most important committee in world football and deals with the implementation of FIFA’s Disciplinary Code and regulates almost all issues related to doping, match-fixing, racism, cheating and arbitration in the game.

Previously, Nayyar had been a member on the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Disciplinary Committee and is also a member of the PFF Congress. He was an IG in police before retiring as Federal Secretary.

Meanwhile, the PFF also held talks with several federations at the sidelines of the FIFA Congress over coming to play a few international friendlies in Pakistan as they look to prepare the national team for the upcoming SAFF Championship.

“We spoke to Bahrain, Maldives, Afghanistan and Nepal over coming over to play in Pakistan,” PFF secretary Col Ahmed Yar Khan Lodhi told Dawn on Wednesday. “Hopefully we could arrange something so as to provide our players with good workout before the SAFF Championship.”

There were also several key decisions taken by the FIFA Congress in Mauritius.

The Congress adopted a resolution that will lead to tougher sanctions in cases of racism, including points deductions and even relegation for repeat offenders.

FIFA also introduced integrity checks on senior officials aimed at cleaning up the body’s tarnished image and welcomed a woman — Lydia Nsekera of Burundi — to its Executive Committee.

However, the issues of term limits and age restrictions were pushed back to next year’s congress in Sao Paolo.

Also, AFC’s interim president Zhang Jilong of China replaced Sri Lankan Vernon Manilal Fernando in the AFC seat in FIFA’s executive committee while the Congress also welcomed Asia’s new head, Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain, for the first time.

Sheikh Salman Ebrahim Al-Khalifa confirmed that Zhang had officially taken Fernando’s place.

“According to our statutes the president nominates and then it is approved by our ExCo members,” he said in an AFC statement. “That’s exactly what we’ve done. Zhang Jilong is the AFC senior vice-president so it’s logical I should have nominated him. It’s a wise choice because he’s been there before. Most of the members have supported it.”