International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach has encouraged Fifa to continue with its reforms, but warned footballs scandal-plagued governing body that the process would be painful.
Bach added that he did not want to give advice to Fifa and pointed out that the structures of the two organisations were enormously different and difficult to compare.
Fifa President Sepp Blatter last week announced he would resign later this year, less than one week after Swiss police staged a dawn raid in Zurich and arrested several officials on corruption charges filed by US prosecutors in New York.
Bach told a news conference at IOC headquarters in Lausanne on Monday: We can only encourage Fifa to continue the way of reforms which obviously have been initiated. We cannot give advice of what to do in detail but we appreciate that there is the readiness obviously for reforms now.
We also know from our experience that the other part of the job, that means putting everything on the desk, can be a painful experience, but that it is absolutely necessary to do this as we have seen from our own history.
He added: We had this kind of problem 15 years ago, that we addressed it there in a way by introducing term limits; by reducing the age limits significantly; by having term limits not only for members, but in particular for all members of the executive board and the president.
In 1998, the IOC was caught in its own bribes-for-votes scandal involving the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. That was the catalyst that led to wholesale reforms within the organisation.
The structure of Fifa is very different from the IOC and that the scope, the difference in the scope is huge, that there is almost no comparison of what happened with regard to Salt Lake City and what is now at stake there with regards to Fifa, Bach said.
