Bukele family extends its influence to Salvadoran football too | OneFootball

The influence of President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador will soon extend to the world’s most popular sport. Yamil, the president’s brother, will head the Salvadoran Football Federation (Fesfut) as soon as the intervention ordered by FIFA in 2022 for alleged corruption comes to an end.

Yamil Bukele, 47, became the sole candidate for the position this Tuesday (11), when the registration deadline for the December 12 election closed. Delegates from local football leagues will cast their votes in this election.

To take on the role, Yamil will have to resign from his “ad honorem” presidency of the National Sports Institute (Indes), a title given to him by his brother Nayib in 2019, which grants him authority over all sports in the country except football.

“We hope things go very well for us, for the good of football and for ourselves,” declared Yamil Bukele last week when he announced his candidacy.

One of his challenges will be to fulfill the dream of bringing El Salvador back to the World Cup, after its last appearance in the 1982 edition in Spain.

In the Concacaf Qualifiers for next year’s World Cup, El Salvador could get closer to a direct spot or an intercontinental playoff in the last two games, against Suriname (November 13) and Panama (November 16).

History of Controversies at Fesfut

Beyond the sporting arena, Yamil Bukele will take over a federation embroiled in controversies in recent years.

In 2022, then Fesfut president Reynaldo Vásquez (2009-2011) was sentenced by a New York court to one and a half years in prison for receiving bribes in the “Fifagate” case, a corruption scandal that affected FIFA and had its epicenter in Latin America.

That same year, FIFA appointed a committee to intervene in Fesfut, as several of its officials were accused of fraudulent administration and money laundering. The organization has not released any recent information about the progress of the case.

In 2024, football’s governing body replaced the so-called Normalization Committee at Fesfut and appointed Panamanian Roland González as president of the federation, who will hand over the position to Yamil Bukele in December.

More recently, FIFA fined Fesfut more than US$60,000 (R$316,000) for racist insults by Salvadoran fans against Surinamese players during a Qualifiers match on September 8.

The “Bukele Clan”

Nayib Bukele has governed El Salvador since 2019, was re-elected in 2024, and controls all branches of the State. His enormous popularity, thanks to his “war” against gangs, benefits the whole family.

“Those who were [at Fesfut] did nothing for football, so it’s good that Yamil is coming. He will work for the good of football,” says Luis Mungía, a 36-year-old delivery worker.

Anthropologist Juan Martínez said that the president’s brother joining Fesfut is “an act of nepotism” by the “Bukele clan” to “co-opt all important spaces,” including sports.

“Beyond the money it moves, football is important for what it means, for its symbolic power,” Martínez explained.

Yamil, a businessman and former basketball player born on the Colombian island of San Andrés, is not the only brother the president has at his side in government.

His brothers Karim (39) and twins Yusef and Ibrahim (36) are close advisors, despite not holding official positions in his cabinet.

In a recently published opinion column in the local newspaper El Diario de Hoy, political scientist Napoleón Campos recalled that, according to FIFA’s statutes, football must be separated from politics.

“Nayib Bukele’s covert intervention is leading football to the brink. It is impossible, and even contradictory, to speak of a ‘process’ that complies with FIFA’s statutes and sports law if the goal is to expand his control over football,” wrote Campos.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇧🇷 here.