The president of the Portuguese Rugby Federation (FPR), Carlos Amado da Silva, was re-elected for the 2023-27 four-year term with the aim of “redoing” the modality internally, the leader told Lusa this Friday.
Amado da Silva, who led the list of single candidates, will be sworn in on Thursday, exactly one week after being re-elected with 63 votes, out of a total of 89 elected delegates who voted, in Oeiras, or sent their ballots by email. correspondence.
“Now it’s time to keep working, because there’s a lot to do and it’s not just the World Cup. At the international level, the results could not have been better, but at the club level, due to the pandemic. [de Covid-19]there is almost everything to redo”, said the re-elected president, in statements to Lusa.
In this sense, he announced, “a rugby dissemination project” will begin “throughout the country”, to return “quickly to 10,000” federated athletes and, “in ten years, reach 20,000” in men’s rugby, in addition to “going from the approximately 500 current registered women to a thousand.”
“Without this, rugby is not sustainable. We are going to spread the sport much more and, above all, think that rugby has to be a national sport. We are going to bet heavily on that”, stressed Amado da Silva.
As for the Portuguese team, next year, after participating in the 2023 World Cup in France, “it will be transition and renewal”, but Amado da Silva says he is “absolutely convinced” that Portugal will be present at the event again in 2027 .
“We are more than sure of qualifying for the World Cup in Australia, not only because of the [previsível] increase in the number of European teams, as well as the quality that the team demonstrates”, he assumed.
Before the term that is now ending, Amado da Silva had already presided over the FPR between 2010 and 2015, when he lost the elections to Luís Cassiano Neves, who did not complete his term, resigning in 2018 and leaving the organization in the hands of a Management Commission. until the election of the following year.
Then, Amado da Silva was elected again, in April 2019, winning a list headed by Lourenço Fernandes Thomaz, with 59 votes to 41, out of a total of 101 voting delegates.
During the last term of Carlos Amado da Silva, the Portuguese rugby team rose to Championshipmain European level of the modality (with the exception of the Six Nations Tournament), after an ‘interregnum’ of three years in the lower category, and qualified for the 2023 World Cup in France.
It will be Portugal’s second participation in a World Cup, after the historic campaign of the ‘wolves’ in France 2007.
Elections for the governing bodies of the FPR have been held every four years, since 2011, after adapting the organization’s statutes to the then new Legal Regime of Sports Federations.
Source: TSF
