Meeting in Ljubljana on Thursday, UEFA's executive committee said it had decided to postpone plans to grant the territory provisional membership until its meeting on Dec. 7-8 "in order to examine new documents submitted shortly before the meeting."

A UEFA spokesman said later: "The Spanish FA has brought to our attention a number of documents recently discovered in their archives, and the executive committee felt there was no time to examine them before its decision today.

"And since no draws or competitions (involving Gibraltar) are taking place in that time, nobody would suffer any damage."

The Spanish football federation (RFEF) said in a statement: "The considered and well-reasoned intervention of RFEF president Angel Maria Villar at the executive committee meeting convinced them to take into account his arguments..."

In July, CAS ordered UEFA's executive committee "to admit the Gibraltar Football Association to provisional membership of UEFA at its next meeting."

The court also ordered the committee to put the question of Gibraltar's application for full membership before the next meeting of the UEFA Congress, due to be held in January 2007.

UEFA had originally declined Gibraltar's request because of a rule in UEFA's statutes stating that membership could only be granted to countries recognised by the United Nations as independent states.

However CAS pointed out that this rule had only been introduced in 2001 -- two years after Gibraltar first filed its application.