Platini hits back on return
Now that Michel Platini has completed a four-year ban from football for accepting a $2million “disloyal payment” from FIFA by approval of then-president Sepp Blatter, the 64-year-old Frenchman has set down his side of the story.
Above all, he blames “schizophrenic” Blatter as having said one thing to his face and the opposite behind his back.
It was at FIFA Congress in 2010, in Johannesburg, that Blatter told Platini that he would stand for FIFA re-election in 2011 and then leave the stage for the UEFA boss Platini in 2015.
However, by 2013 Platini realised that his route map to the FIFA presidency was no longer so clear, explaining: “Our relationship had never been a simple one. I believe Blatter had a dual complex towards me: one of superiority in taking me for an imbecile but also one of inferiority because he envied me my playing career and my popularity.”
Noting that Blatter had become “more cool and distant”, he was not surprised when, a year later, the Swiss decided to stand for re-election because “FIFA is my life”.
A year later Platini was in Warsaw for the Europa League Final on the day Swiss police enacted their early-morning arrests at the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich.
Two days later Blatter was re-elected. Within weeks he had announced his decision to stand down and Platini announced his own candidacy. Then, fatefully, on September 25 legal director Marco Villiger – “the keeper of FIFA’s secrets” – summoned Blatter and Platini from an ExCo meeting for questioning by police. And that, effectively, was that.
The timing, for Platini, was so Swiss attorney-general Michael Lauber could enjoy a PR coup of his own after having been outplayed by the FBI.
But the abiding question is, amid all the documentation seized by police, how did they go straight to Blatter’s approval of Platini’s longdelayed $2m?
Blatter blamed Villiger, but Platini blames Blatter and insists FIFA secretarygeneral Jerome Valcke and Philippe Blatter – Sepp’s nephew and head of TV rights partner InFront – had been in on the plot to secure “my political elimination”.