If You Want to Go to UEFA, Go, But You Can’t Stay Here: FAF Founder Armen Melikbekyan

The founder of the FAF fan movement, Sergey Djanjoyan, wrote on Facebook: 'I suggest we shift our focus from the upcoming elections to Melikbekyan’s UEFA executive committee membership. The president of the HFF is not going to resign, nor does he comment on why he intends to stay or for how long.'

It is becoming evident to all of us that the issue is not about getting a new chance or correcting mistakes, but rather about much deeper themes and dependencies, which we will discuss in due time. Melikbekyan is indeed capable of writing and formulating good programs and visions. Looking back, most of his projects have been good, and the implementation of 70-80% of them could have put our football back on its feet. Time has shown that the positive impact of his football capabilities is limited to that.

He failed to introduce a management system, could not assemble a professional team living off football, and did not manage to communicate with representatives of the football world across all sectors. He could not change the rotten system from the top down, and when he did not refuse the leather furniture of the previous HFF president, the S-class Mercedes, and other legacies, the entire structure began to consume him.

The seat became increasingly sweet for him and his team. This means that the promised programs and long-term strategies, which were supposed to be implemented with quarterly monitoring, become unrealistic as a result of his failures. Initially, he tries to convince himself, and then the public, that the reasons for the failures and unfulfilled promises are the various disasters faced by our country and the world.

In practice, the only way to avoid leaving the HFF or diverting attention from the aforementioned is to focus on the only high-demand football product in our country – the national team. After the disgraceful defeat to Norway in 2022, I last urged him to step into reality, lock himself away in his office on Khanzhyan 27, and move to the academy, which has turned into a football mess. My pleas were in vain. All means were used to appear with the national team, even temporarily, to achieve quick results.

Aside from bringing in every possible Armenian and non-Armenian player, including those who have played in our league for five years, for the first time, Melikbekyan intervened in the national team’s internal affairs. This is another story... A few years later, in our time, when the strategy of diverting attention with the national team also failed, the HFF finally turned into ruins from within, a new Plan A and Plan B were developed, but the same old life raft combinations were played out.

1. Getting into the UEFA executive committee. 2. Co-hosting the 2029 FIFA U-20 World Cup with Georgia.

Thus, new reasons were brought to continue the tenure. Month after month, accusations of failures have echoed: from strategic failures to the selection of a coach, calls for transparency, demands for resignations from various layers, detailed justifications for unfulfilled promises.

The fertile ground for inter-ethnic strife created by your short-sighted and impotent leadership for the matches against Georgia was, to some extent, mitigated through the efforts of our and Georgian fan clubs in home and away games. The seven-story praises for the degraded results did not address, did not respond, but pointed towards your desire to work at UEFA.

‘Brother, if you want to go to UEFA, go wherever you want, but you cannot remain here, nor what is the point of staying.’ There’s nothing left to prove; what you have done and how much you have done is sufficient, and more is impossible given the current situation. The portal through which you might have been able to leave by saying 'I tried, it didn’t work,' is closing. Do not remain under a label that you won’t be able to rectify for the rest of your life, and this applies to every member of your team who equally bears responsibility.

Do not create principles; show wisdom so that tomorrow people will not remember you with mere 'praise.' I don’t want to address the accusations directed at us because I know for a fact that those who spread the notion of us being influenced know our type is not guided. The dissemination of these theses through the press and their lackeys is primitive, yet remains the only remaining self-defense tool.

In any case, I want to repeat what I said in my last press conference: all those who propagate the idea of our being guided, those who have ever attempted to guide us, and any individual from our movement who has benefited materially from this process or anticipated gain are immoral. It is high time to address the correct evaluation of current issues and pathways to emerge from this dire situation, to speak of a new federation that will be our primary task ahead.'