{"id":12198,"date":"2011-06-01T06:08:59","date_gmt":"2011-06-01T13:08:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2011\/06\/01\/iran-likely-to-hold-onto-its-four-asian-champions-league-spots\/"},"modified":"2011-06-01T06:08:59","modified_gmt":"2011-06-01T13:08:59","slug":"iran-likely-to-hold-onto-its-four-asian-champions-league-spots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/2011\/06\/01\/iran-likely-to-hold-onto-its-four-asian-champions-league-spots\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran to hold onto its four AFC Champions League spots"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align: left;\">Goal.com &#8211; <strong>Asian Football Confederation delegation have been impressed by the  <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin: 10px; float: right;\" alt=\"sep-ahan\" src=\"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/sep-ahan.jpg\" height=\"230\" width=\"403\" \/>improvements made by Iran&#8217;s Pro League clubs during their inspection but  there&#8217;s still work to be done.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p> Iran&#8217;s efforts to meet the criteria required to hold onto all four of  its Asian Champions League (ACL) spots have been met with a positive  response from Asian Football Confederation (AFC) inspectors.<\/p>\n<p> The AFC sent out a Special Mission Team (SMT) to inspect Iran&#8217;s Pro  League (IPL) after concerns were raised last year about the  competition&#8217;s facilities, group flow and match attendance counts.<\/p>\n<p> The issues needed to be improved upon in order to ensure Iran could hold onto its four ACL spots in the future.<\/p>\n<p> On the final day of the inspection, AFC director of competition and  professional football projects Tokuaki Suzuki spoke positively about the  improvements made at IPL headquarters on Monday.<\/p>\n<p> \u201cThey made big progress and improvement, which I am delighted about,\u201d said Suzuki.<\/p>\n<p> \u201cToday, we will discuss how to improve further Iran football and I hope that this meeting will be fruitful to all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p> However, Suzuki acknowledged improvements still need to be made to meet ACL criteria.<\/p>\n<p> Among the improvements Suzuki said the IPL needed to make were better  facilities for media, VIP and fans, better training facilities and  pitches, better media services, more active responsibility from clubs  and an accreditation card system.<\/p>\n<p> Suzuki did also point to several positive aspects of Iranian football  including a large fan base, strong leadership and progress from the IPL  and Iran Football Federation as well as the establishment of a good  youth system.<\/p>\n<p> IPL president Aziz Mohammadi thanked the AFC delegation for their visit.<\/p>\n<p> \u201cWe are very glad that we can hear our weak points from you and we  promise that the Iranian clubs and league shall improve based on your  suggestions,\u201d said Mohammadi.<\/p>\n<p> \u201cAs you are aware, to Iranian football fans, it is very important to  keep or increase the slots in the AFC Champions League and we shall do  our best to meet the criteria.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Goal.com &#8211; Asian Football Confederation delegation have been impressed by the improvements made by Iran&#8217;s&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12197,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c17-asian-competitions"],"views":3317,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.persianfootball.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}