Within a press conference held at the Football House, the president of the Romanian Football Federation, Răzvan Burleanu, announced the action plan that the Romanian Football Federation proposes for the following period.
”As I told you, after our return from France, we took a few days for analyzing the situation, in order not to come in front of our supporters, the stakeholders of football and you with random speeches.
I am very sorry for all the supporters of the national team who had hoped for a better or for a more spectacular development of the national football team. We were all sad that we couldn’t do better. Though Vlad Chiricheș wanted to look unaffected, I am honestly telling you that I saw several players with tears in their eyes after the game. They wanted very much to pass the group stage, yet, as you have seen, it was not that will that we lacked, but we lacked the actual capacity to rise to the expectations.
It was clearly noticeable that there were several negative factors leading to our defeat in the game with Albania: the fatigue accumulated during the games against France and Switzerland, the fact that only few of our players play constantly at their football clubs, let alone the short periods between the games. We should not forget that these boys have grown up in difficult conditions, that the Romanian football has offered them very little and that they have given us everything they had. The qualification was the actual performance of the players and of the team itself, and this was not the performance of stars or providential players.
As the president of the Romanian Football Federation, I want to assure all the supporters that during these past two years we did everything that depended on us so that the national team would benefit from all the conditions that we could cover. I don’t wish to remind everyone of what we found two years ago. Under these conditions, the entire responsibility for the achievement of this objective lays in the responsibility of the technical staff.
I thank Mr. Iordănescu for the fact that he assumed a great responsibility at a time when there was such a need for someone to do so, I thank him for the fact that he took us to the European Championship and I wish for him to continue occupying a position within the Romanian Football Federation.
Before the European Championship ends, we shall announce the name of the new coach of the national team. We are open both to a foreign coach and to a Romanian one. The important thing is for him to fit the profile: having an experience of at least ten years, having trophies in his portfolio and being motivated to take the national team to the World Championship after a 20 year break.
This time we couldn’t do better than this qualification, which was the first one after a long eight years’ break. That is because all the devotion in the world and all the administrative sacrifices possible can’t cover in a few months an over two decades old desert.
After the technical and financial analysis processes that I have carried together with my colleagues and with other stakeholders in football from outside the federation, we have reached a set of solutions that we are considering, proving once more that they can’t be delayed. These proposals will be submitted for approval to the Executive Committee within the following sessions.
We shall approach directly the real problems that we have in the 1st League: based on a new licensing manual, the teams that have declared insolvency will be penalized by points and they will not be allowed to play in Romania’s Cup and in the play-offs and afterwards they will be downgraded in the third or in the last division, 10% of the transfer amount that the clubs receive will have to be invested in the children’s and juniors’ center, there will be a stricter control performed by the Romanian Football Federation and in the case of these amounts, as well as in the case of the money coming from UEFA, we will carry consultation sessions with the clubs in the 1st and 2nd Leagues in order to find an optimal method to reinsert the mandatory nature of junior centers. By next fall, we shall open two more centers for excellence and also in the fall we will start implementing the training policy, a manual-strategy applied for each age category, an aspect which was completely non-existent in Romania.
Also, the entire profit from the purchase of the tickets that the Romanian Football Federation shall achieve after organizing the games of the national team in the qualification stage of the World Championship in 2018 will be directed to the development of juniors’ football. And this will not be done generally; for each game, we shall assign a specific project that the fans will know to have financed by means of their presence on the stadium.
I thank very much all the supporters that were with us in the qualifications and at EURO, to all who attended all the projects that we have initiated in order to bring them back to the Romanian football.”
