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Football·International Regulations·FIFA

FIFA Statutes - June 2019 edition

SupersededJune 2019
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The FIFA Statutes, June 2019 edition, adopted by the Paris Congress on 5 June 2019 and effective immediately; the "Council" has replaced the "Executive Committee", and a standalone human rights article appears in the text for the first time.

Adoption5 June 2019 — FIFA Congress, Paris
In force fromImmediately upon adoption
Structure75 articles of the Statutes + Regulations Governing the Application of the Statutes + Standing Orders of the Congress
StatusSuperseded — replaced by the May 2021 edition

What are the FIFA Statutes?

The FIFA Statutes are the constitutive instrument of the federation: they determine FIFA's legal nature and seat, its objectives, the conditions of membership of national associations and their rights and obligations, the position of the confederations, the structure of the organs (the Congress, the Council, the general secretary, the standing committees and the judicial bodies), and the dispute resolution mechanism, including referral to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The Regulations Governing the Application of the Statutes and the Standing Orders of the Congress are also published within the same document.

About the June 2019 editionA new era of governance

Pursuant to article 75 (Enforcement), these Statutes were adopted at the Paris Congress on 5 June 2019 and came into force immediately upon adoption.

The interval between this edition and the previous edition held in this collection (2007) encompasses FIFA's 2016 governance reforms; the Standing Orders of the Congress state within this same document that they were adopted at the Extraordinary Congress in Zurich on 26 February 2016.

Key changes from the previous edition

  1. Replacement of the "Executive Committee" by the "Council"The term "Executive Committee" was removed from the text entirely and the organ known as the "Council" replaced it — the most fundamental structural change to FIFA's governance in this family of instruments.
  2. Insertion of a standalone "Human rights" articleArticle 3, entitled "Human rights", was inserted into the Statutes for the first time: "FIFA is committed to respecting all internationally recognised human rights and shall strive to promote the protection of these rights."
  3. Rewriting of the non-discrimination articleThe title of article 4 was changed to "Non-discrimination, equality and neutrality", expressly stating the concepts of equality and neutrality alongside non-discrimination.
  4. Introduction of the Audit and Compliance Committee and the Governance CommitteeThe section on "independent committees" was arranged to cover the Audit and Compliance Committee and the judicial bodies (the Disciplinary Committee, the Ethics Committee and the Appeal Committee), and the Governance Committee and the Review Committee were placed among the standing committees.
  5. Establishment of the Bureau of the Council and institutional independenceStandalone articles for the "Bureau of the Council" and for "institutional independence" were inserted into the organisational structure.

Who this document matters to

The Football Federation of the Islamic Republic of Iran is required to comply with the principles of this document in drafting its own statutes; independence from third-party interference, the holding of free and periodic elections, and the requirement to have recourse to the Court of Arbitration for Sport rather than to national courts all derive from it. For sports lawyers, the Statutes are likewise the basis for establishing the competence of FIFA's organs and the legitimacy of their decisions.