German Football Association (DFB) President Reinhard Grindel resigned with immediate effect, the DFB announced Tuesday.
Grindel, who took over the world’s biggest sports federation by membership in 2016, had been under mounting pressure in recent days over reports regarding income from a DFB subsidiary and a present he had received from a foreign colleague.
The DFB, which will host the Euro 2024 tournament, was not immediately available for comment.
Grindel, a former journalist and conservative Christian Democrat (CDU) member of parliament, has been in the spotlight after a Spiegel report identified a 78,000-euro ($87,000) income from a DFB subsidiary that had not been publicly known.
A Bild newspaper report on Monday said Grindel had also received an expensive watch worth several thousand euros from a then colleague on the European soccer body UEFA in 2017.
Former German national team star of Turkish origin Mesut Özil retired from international football in July last year. In his quitting letter, Özil mentioned Grindel by his name, implying that he was one of the people that was responsible for his retirement prompted by racist abuse.
“In the eyes of Grindel and his supporters, I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose,” Özil said in his letter.
Grindel, who is a UEFA Executive committee member as well as a FIFA Council member, succeeded Wolfgang Niersbach, who was forced to resign from the DFB amid allegations of vote-rigging for the 2006 World Cup and a payment to world soccer’s governing body FIFA that triggered a separate investigation.
Grindel, who had virtually no international experience in football when he took over the role, oversaw the DFB-commissioned investigation in the 2006 affair that found no proof of vote-buying but could not explain the million-dollar payment via FIFA that eventually landed with a senior FIFA official.
BY DAILY SABAH NEWS
