Enough is enough

We have swallowed too much poison, but Blatter, Dyke and Platini still don’t get it...

THEY still don’t get it, do they? Sepp Blatter, Michel Platini and Greg Dyke still don’t understand. Unlike Thomas Bach, the IOC president, they still can’t accept that enough is enough. They can’t see that it’s over. They have not learned that when the revolution comes and the gates to the palace are torn down, the usual platitudes of denial and outrage are not going to wash.

The gravy train has hit the buffers, boys, and everybody is rejoicing except you. Admit that the waters around you have grown. Nobody knows what the solution is yet, except that it is not Issa Hayatou. But out of the chaos of revolution, order eventually emerges and, anyway, it has got to the point where anything is preferable to the diseased venality of Blatter’s regime.

The fall of UEFA president Platini is the saddest of all the falls because of the beautiful player he once was and the opportunity he has wasted, but his outburst of pompous outrage at his 90-day suspension last week betrayed a shocking lack of awareness of the change that is sweeping through the game.

Platini appealed against his ban yesterday but earlier in the week it was bitterly funny to hear him talking about how the allegations he faces were ‘astonishingly vague’. It was funny because, actually, it is he who has been astonishingly vague about the mysterious payment of £1.3million that he received in 2011 from his former friend, Blatter, for work he did as his adviser between 1998 and 2002.

Platini has missed the point. He was once one of Blatter’s trusted confidants, he advised him, he did his work, he voted for Qatar to stage the 2022 World Cup in summer, he was paid lavish amounts of money by Blatter.

That he still has the front to put himself forward for the FIFA presidential election next year is staggering. That there are still people, like Dyke, keen to vote for him, is even more staggering. A vote for Platini now is a vote for the old ways and we have had our fill of them.

MAYBE one day, Platini will manage to convince us that there was absolutely no connection between the fact that he received the payment of two million Swiss francs in February 2011 and that soon afterwards, UEFA, the organisation he still heads, declared their support for Blatter to be re-elected as FIFA president.

But the wheel’s still in spin and even if he persuades us — and he and his advisers have done a risibly poor job so far on all counts — Platini seems to be unable to grasp that the mere existence of such a huge payment from Blatter, whatever its timing, is enough to damn him.

‘I was employed by FIFA as a special adviser to president Sepp Blatter,’ he said recently when he was pressed to explain the payment, ‘working on various matters related to football, such as the international football calendar. It was a full-time job.’

It is so comforting to know it was a full-time job, although he managed to fit in being vice-president of the French Football Federation from 2000 as well. No doubt that was purely a ceremonial post that did not impinge upon his work on the international football calendar.

Choosing which Lionel Messi picture he’d like to use for April, perhaps? And ineffably more serious matters, no doubt. He was paid at the time but only part of his agreed salary, he says, because poor FIFA was not yet raking in the vast amounts of money from the game that it does now. Blatter, Platini asks us to believe, pleaded poverty. Really? So why was Platini not paid what he was owed in 2003, when FIFA made a £93m profit? Or in 2004, when FIFA made a £105m profit? Or in 2005, when FIFA made a £142m profit? Or in 2006, when FIFA made a £202m profit?

Bach is right. Enough is enough. We have been insulted by this kind of claptrap for too long. We have swallowed so much poison from FIFA and their acolytes that the nausea is overwhelming us now. Too much money has been taken out of the game. Too much cash has swelled the pockets of fat cats and apparatchiks.

It is obvious to the vast majority of people who love football that the sport’s post-Blatter world cannot be led by Platini. Platini represents continuity. Football desperately needs change. Dyke, the FA chairman, cannot see that and is refusing to withdraw the FA’s support for the Frenchman to take over as FIFA president.

In his very own Gerald Ratner moment, Dyke boasted recently that when you get as old and as rich as him ‘you don’t give a ****’. We don’t want people like that involved in making decisions about FIFA any more. We want people who do care. In his continued support of Platini, which is allying the FA with all the ills of FIFA’s discredited ancien regime, Dyke shows he is a man out of his time.

The regime is doomed. Platini doesn’t get that. Dyke doesn’t get it. They are soon to be relics, whose old road is rapidly aging. Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand because at long, long last, the times are changing.