TEHRAN - Members of the board of directors of the Football Federation of the Islamic Republic of Iran (FFIRI), who are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the federation, want to remove FFIRI president Shahabeddin Azizi Khadem from his position.

Azizi Khadem has two-week time to hold the board of directors' meeting; otherwise, after this period, the FFIRI board of directors can directly hold the extraordinary meeting without the presence of the president of the federation.

According to the FFIRI Statutes, the board of directors has the authority to dismiss the president of the federation. The final decision should be made at the FFIRI general assembly.

From the beginning of his tenure in this position, he has faced controversies and they were widely covered in the Iranian media. Many sports media and experts criticized the legal and economic ambiguities in the contracts related to the football federation.

Mehrdad Seraji, Bahram Rezaian, Shohreh Mousavi, Ehsan Osuli, and Mirshad Majedi are the five members of the board who have signed the letter of request for the meeting to remove the head of FFIRI. 

Among the problems that have been observed during Azizi Khadem's presence in the football federation was the removing of the popular teams of Persepolis and Esteghlal from the 2022 AFC Champions League competitions by the Asian Football Confederation due to the team's failure to satisfy all of the mandatory criteria to get the professional license.

It is an incident that has not yet been cleared who is to blame for it.

FFIRI's board of directors will meet soon to decide whether to appoint a temporary replacement as the federation’s president.