The timely declaration from Prince Ali Bin Al-Hussein that he will challenge Sepp Blatter for the Presidency of FIFA in May is the most welcome news yet for sport in 2015 - a year in which leadership off the field will be even more crucial than achievement on it.

The year sees two key international posts up for grabs, with the outcome of pending elections certain to determine the shape of sport to come.

The hope is that in May a Prince will ascend to the throne of world football, assuming timely proper governance of a game embedded in sleaze and corruption.

Three months later a good Lord looks set to become the new ruler of sport's other major ruling body, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), with Sebastian Coe, one of track and field's most revered icons, the favourite to become head honcho of an equally troubled global pursuit upon which scurrilous chemists and cynically cheating athletes continue to leave such indelible scars.

These are game-changing times for Sepp and Seb, for differing reasons. The former surely has had his day, and must go; for the latter the time has come for him to rise to yet another challenge, as I believe he will.

When Prince Ali, like Coe already a vice-president of his organisation, announced his candidacy this week he made a point of saying he wants the emphasis to be on football again and not FIFA.

"It is time to shift the focus away from administrative controversy and back to sport. The headlines should be about football, not about FIFA," he said.

Good on him.

But can he unseat slippery Sepp, who himself won a bitter election against former UEFA president Lennart Johansson in 1998? Those close to the Prince say he would not stake his reputation on such a fight if he did not believe it is one he could win.

Prince Ali of Jordan will run against current FIFA President Sepp Blatter in May
©Getty Images



Prince Ali, President of Jordanian football since 1999, and current vice-president of the Asian Football Federation, says he has been encouraged to stand by colleagues.

"The message I heard, over and over, was that it is time for a change. The world game deserves a world-class governing body - an international federation that is a service organisation and a model of ethics, transparency and good governance."

It could be that the recent resignation of World Cup corruption inquisitor Michael Garcia has now inflicted a fatal blow to the re-election prospects of the won't-let-go Blatter, who seeks a fifth term of office at 79 at the FIFA Congress in Zurich on May 29.

For it is believed to have finally convinced Prince Ali, always potentially his most credible rival outside of Michel Platini, to challenge him.

The well-respected Prince, who at 39 is the youngest member of the FIFA Executive Committee, was angered at Blatter's blockade of Garcia's damaging report, and the ethics investigator's decision to quit in protest, citing "a lack of leadership", was to be the tipping point.

Prince Ali has been a strong backer of American lawyer Garcia and a leading advocate of his full findings being revealed. The fourth son of the late King Hussein of Jordan and brother to King Abdullah II, his half-brother Prince Feisal is a prominent member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

While his reformist views are not shared by Blatter and FIFA's old guard, many believe Prince Ali is the ideal figure to clean up the discredited governing body's shabby act, among them newly re-elected UEFA president Platini, and Britain's Home Football Associations.

Prince Ali can also expect firm support from Asia and the CONACAF federations - notably the United States and Caribbean nations. This might just be enough to oust Blatter - or force him to reconsider his position.

Prince Ali's decision to stand in the FIFA election in May will provide arguably the strongest challenge to Sepp Blatter's reign as President to date ©Getty Images

Others who say they may challenge the Swiss are Frenchman Jerome Champagne and former Chilean FA president Harold Mayne-Nicholls. But neither carry the clout, charisma or connections of Prince Ali.

It is good that someone of such substance finally has the balls to stand against Blatter.

More bad news for Blatter is that his native Switzerland is clearly growing tired of the repeated corruption allegations, and has passed a law which demands closer scrutiny of governing bodies to whom they are a tax sanctuary.

These include FIFA and the IOC. Further legislation is in the pipeline to make corrupt acts in sports linked to Swiss-based bodies a criminal offence.

Of course, it is not a foregone conclusion that Prince Ali or anyone else will depose battle-hardened Blatter.

But curiously one man who might have done so had his career been in football rather than athletics is one Sebastian Newbold Coe.

How FIFA members must wish they had a Coe in their midst. Yet they did have once, as the Chelsea fan was called in by Blatter to chair their Ethics Committee in September 2006. He stood down from this post to join the bid team that failed to bring the 2018 World Cup to England amid allegations of a FIFA stitch-up.

So he well knows the murky machinations of world football.

Had he remained on FIFA's books could he have, in the immortal words of Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, been a contender?

Sebastian Coe has already demonstrated his prowess as a leader and could have been in the frame to challenge Blatter if he stayed with FIFA ©Getty Images



The multi-faceted Lord Coe - an ardent boxing aficionado - was also courted a couple of years back as a future chair of the British Boxing Board of Control.

But it is his beloved athletics where the British Olympic Association (BOA) chief may once again get the opportunity to demonstrate his organisational supremacy on a global scale, as he did for London 2012.

It is interesting that the biography in his comprehensive election manifesto for the Presidency of the IAAF makes no mention of his peerage. It is a deliberate omission for Baron Coe of Ranmore, who says as far as athletics is concerned he is, and always will, be plain Seb. Good on him too.

Unlike the last British Lord to be president of the IAAF. Some interesting coincidences here. Like Coe, the far more autocratic Lord Exeter was also an Olympic athlete - a hurdler - as well as a Tory MP, chair of the BOA and organiser-in-chief of a London Olympics - the 1948 Summer Games.

Coe would also take over a body under a cloud, and not just for its eternal struggle with drugs. Current octogenarian President Lamine Diack, like Blatter, is embroiled in controversy with his son Papa Massae suspended from his IAAF marketing role for allegedly soliciting a $5million (£3 million/€4 million) bribe in relation to Qatar's failed bid for the 2017 World Athletics Championships.

And Treasurer Valentin Balakhnichiev has temporarily vacated the post while a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Commission investigates any connection with the Russian doping scandal.

While unquestionably a popular figure among the athletics elite, winning the Presidency in August's Beijing election won't be a cakewalk for Coe either.

His most likely rival, Sergey Bubka, is also a good guy and an able adversary. But crucially he lacks Coe's cachet as an administrator.

Coe's brilliant overseeing of London 2012 surely will remain fresh in the of the IAAF's 200-odd electorate, not least for his determination to ensure that the Olympic Stadium retained a tangible legacy for track and field, as he had vowed when London won the bid seven years earlier.

So my prediction for those worthy couple of contenders stalking sports corridors of power in 2015 is that Coe will soar above Ukraine's pole vault legend and that a man appropriately named Ali will knock out Blatter, though it may take a round or two.

Alan Hubbard is a sports columnist for the Independent on Sunday and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Games, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire.