Park Ji-sung Appoints ‘AFC Professional Football TF’ Chairman…Only Korean to Lead ACL Development
Park Ji-sung (42), technical director of Jeonbuk Hyundai in the K League 1, took on a heavy responsibility for the development of Asian professional football.
The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) announced on the 3rd (local time) that it appointed the chairmen and vice chairmen of 16 AFC standing committees that will serve for four years from this year to 2027.
The AFC appointed Park Ji-sung as the chairman of the “Professional Football Task Force.”
Park Ji-sung is the only Korean among the 16 standing committee chairmen.
Han Eun-kyung, vice chairman of the North Korean Football Association, an AFC executive, was appointed as vice chairman of the AFC Development Committee.
The “AFC Professional Football TF,” led by Chairman Park Ji-sung, was a committee approved by the AFC Executive Committee in Manama, Bahrain, on the 1st of last month.
The executive committee, which held its first meeting presided over by Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Khalifa, who succeeded in serving a second term at the time, unanimously approved the establishment of a professional football TF proposed by the AFC Games Committee last year to manage and supervise the transformation of Asian club football.
“We have already expressed our ambition to take Asian club football to a new level,” Salman said. “The formation of the AFC professional football TF is a timely step in moving in the right direction following the approval of a strategic reform plan for the AFC club tournament late last year.”
Last year, AFC changed the AFC Champions League (ACL), which determines Asia’s strongest professional football team, from the current “Chunchu Festival,” which starts in the spring and ends in the fall, to “Chunchu Festival,” which opens in the fall and ends in the spring of the following year.
It also approved a plan to expand the number of foreign players who can play per team to ‘5+1’, two more than now.
Park Ji-sung, the leading figure in the semifinals of the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup, played for Eindhoven in the Netherlands and Manchester United in England and retired in 2014.
In 2015, he was appointed as a member of the AFC Social Contribution Committee for a four-year term, and began his transformation into a football administrator. 토토추천
From 2016 to 2017, he took the FIFA Master Course at De Montfort University in Leicester, England.
He then served as the head of Youth Strategy Headquarters, a general executive of youth soccer at the Korea Football Association, for about a year from the end of 2017.
He was appointed as an advisor to Jeonbuk in 2021 and has been working as a technical director since last year.