U.S. Soccer gathers in San Antonio for 2016 annual meeting, including vice presidential election
The U.S. Soccer Federation is set to convene its 100th annual general meeting at a downtown hotel in San Antonio, Texas this weekend, at which time the organization will hold an election for its executive vice president position.
The gathering will also include board of directors meetings for USSF member organizations like the USASA, US Youth Soccer and the U.S. Soccer Foundation, and committees like the one that manages the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup. Intriguingly, it may also prove to be the occasion on which USSF’s long-rumored new logo is unveiled; on late Thursday night the federation’s social media channels posted videos hinting as much, with twitter accounts subsequently changing their avatar images to blank white squares.
USSF president Sunil Gulati and several federation staff members face a quick turnaround and travel schedule as they jet over from Friday’s FIFA extraordinary congress in Zurich, Switzerland in time to take part in the AGM, which technically began with USASA (U.S. Adult Soccer Association) events on Thursday.
USSF’s General Council meeting is scheduled for Saturday morning; last year’s took less than 90 minutes.
Gulati’s duties are many and include leadership of meetings of the General Council – termed “the representative membership body of the Federation.” The explicit responsibilities of the VP position are much less substantial, however, with federation bylaws mostly describing the vice president’s duties thusly:
“The Vice President shall assist the President in the performance of the President’s responsibilities and shall exercise all the powers of the President in the President’s absence.”
Both the president and vice president positions are elected for four-year terms. Current VP Mike Edwards, who has held the post since 2006, is running for re-election against longtime USSF board member and former Goldman Sachs executive Carlos Cordeiro and US Club Soccer CEO Kevin Payne.
Edwards, who lives in New Mexico and works in the public utilities industry, is the registrar for his home state’s association and served as the president of the USASA from 1997-2006.
A veteran consultant with a Harvard MBA and more than three decades of experience in high-level corporate environments, Cordeiro served as a Partner and Managing Director of The Goldman Sachs Group over a 12-year career with the powerful – and controversial – investment giant. He has also worked as a director at energy company BHP Billiton, a senior banker at the World Bank and in the derivatives and capital markets with Credit Suisse First Boston.
Cordeiro joined USSF’s board of directors in 2007 as the federation’s first-ever “independent director,” an initiative intended to bring new and diverse leadership into the organization at a time when the BOD was reduced in size from 40 to 15 members.
A well-known figure from his tenure as a co-founder and longtime president of D.C. United, Payne has worked in multiple areas of North American soccer from the grassroots to professional levels and has served the federation in multiple executive positions and board chairmanships dating back to the 1980s. He currently leads US Club Soccer, one of the newest and most active membership bodies in the youth game.
+VIEW the full weekend schedule of the 2016 USSF AGM here
+READ more about the USSF board, bylaws and policies here
+PERUSE the transcripts and summaries from previous AGMs, including last year’s in San Francisco
