The new leader of soccer in North and Central America and the Caribbean on how he intends to rebuild a shattered confederation

The man elected to rebuild Concacaf after decades of misconduct by officials believes it may take years to change a culture of corruption across the region.

The new Concacaf president Victor Montagliani, who leads soccer across North and Central America and the Caribbean, told the Guardian how rebuilding a shattered confederation that is the center of investigations by both Fifa and the US Department of Justice was similar to recovering from a death.

He added that players and fans, rather than top level executives, had saved the sport after events last year saw world football’s leadership – including Fifa president Sepp Blatter, his Uefa counterpart Michel Platini, and a cast of other regional bosses and business figures – revealed as crooked, corrupt or, at best, conflicted.

“It is like anything in your life that has had a negative affect or is a tragedy,” said Montagliani who has also served as president of Canada Soccer since 2012.

“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.”

'We have to get back to football': Copa América begins amid ashes of scandal Read more

Montagliani was elected president last May to become the confederation’s third president in a year. His predecessors include Jeffrey Webb, a banker from the Cayman Islands, and Alfredo Hawit, a lawyer from Honduras. In the past 12 months, both pled guilty to corruption-related charges laid by the DOJ while the infamous Jack Warner of Trinidad, Concacaf president from 1990 to 2011, faces an extradition request from US authorities in addition to a $50m lawsuit from Concacaf alleging fraudulent misuse of funds.

“I am not going to sit calmly in the chair and announce that we are all done,” Montagliani said. “We are out [of trouble] in some areas but from an overall cultural perspective it is going to take time. Whether you look from the outside in or the inside out, we know that it is a massive challenge There is no doubt.”

Montagliani is something of a poster boy for reform within the sport. While other federations supported a Fifa status quo even amid the worldwide scandal that unraveled in 2015, Montagliani led Canada Soccer to announce it would vote against Blatter in his bid for reelection that year. Montagliani and Canada instead publicly announced support for Prince Ali Bin Hussein of Jordan, whose challenge for Fifa’s leadership ultimately failed (Canada Soccer switched their allegiance to Gianni Infantino in 2016).

The 50-year-old has built a career as a risk manager with Vancouver insurance firms and recently headed the organizing committee for the 2015 Fifa Women’s World Cup, hosted by Canada. He also sits on Fifa’s Reform Committee, Legal Committee, and the Israel-Palestine Relations Committee (yes, Fifa has one).

“I totally get the skepticism from the public about reform and I think everyone at Fifa gets it,” Montagliani said. “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 realize is that as much as there has been a bit of a shitstorm 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 shit doesn’t happen again.”

Concacaf, whose 41-members include regional giants Mexico and the United States as well as small Caribbean islands like St Lucia and Montserrat, was effectively eviscerated by last year’s corruption scandal.

Its Miami headquarters were raided by the FBI and 16 individuals with ties to the organization as federation representatives or as commercial partners were indicted. In addition, Traffic Sports International and Traffic Sports USA – related companies boasting media and events partnerships with Concacaf – pled guilty to wire fraud conspiracy.

Montagliani has unique perspective on Concacaf’s commercial partnerships. He sat on the evaluation committee that initially appointed Traffic as a media and marketing rights holder in 2012 and then later headed a review committee that severed Concacaf’s Traffic deal in 2015 after the revelations.

“We have started the conversation with both Fifa and the Department of Justice [about cleaning up Concacaf],” Montagliani said. “More so with Fifa than the DOJ. The DOJ are the silent types, let me put it that way. They don’t necessarily say anything if you are doing well but if you are not doing well you will hear about it. Hopefully, there are no other crabs on the rocks for us. If there are we will deal with it and [the DOJ] will deal with it but we are going to do the right thing.

“The clean up is not so much just governance. That should be obvious to everybody. It is also a corporate clean up: how we do things; how we communicate; a lot of little things. I did a tour with our new general secretary last month to visit all our current sponsors and partners. More than one of them said to me that I was the first president to have ever gone to visit them. These are some of our sponsors that have been with us since the 1990s. A little thing like that makes a cultural change in the organization.”

Big money sponsors aside, Montagliani stressed it was important for the sport’s administrators to reflect on the depth of their responsibilities. “What motivates me more than anything is that it doesn’t matter if you are wearing a suit and are a sports executive or any of that,” he said.

“I still feel sometimes like a little 12-year-old boy, sitting in front of the TV screaming at his favorite team. I have to remind people of that because this job is not always like the corporate world where you are doing things because of a bottom line and there are shareholders.

“Sometimes, the bottom line is is not necessarily that you made ‘x’ amount of dollars on the Gold Cup. Sometimes, it is making sure 14-year-old girls from Haiti get an opportunity to play in a tournament.”