Let me say, to begin with, that Platini was one of the greatest players I have ever seen. In my formative years as an SBS commentator, calling games involving Platini, especially of that great Juventus side he marshalled with Rossi, Scirea, Tardelli, Cabrini etc, was among my great career joys.
His beautiful passing, those slide rule accurate and perfectly weighted through balls, the curled free kicks to the top corner, were of a repertoire unique to him. He was deservedly won the Ballon d’Or three times, indisputably the best in his time.
When he stayed behind on a tour Juve made to Australia in 1984 I was heartbroken.
At one time I would have loved to have seen him become FIFA president, the first former great footballer to do so. But not any more. In fact, I fervently hope he fails in that quest next February when Sepp Blatter moves on and a new boss of the world game will be elected.
As I write, the bookmakers have Platini as a roaring favourite at 4/7. His nearest fancy is Jordan’s Prince Ali at 7/2. Even the hardly Francophile English FA folks are saying he is their man, which only shows how even some of the most influential of football’s stakeholders don’t get it when it comes to what reforms the game’s governing body needs.
What the game needs is a new FIFA president who hails from the bright side, a clean skin with an unblemished record, someone who is seen to be doing something for football and not in order to gain position, power and a good salary. Platini, I regret to say, hails from the dark side.
He may have been Le Roi as a footballer but there are real dangers in him becoming The King as an administrator. Let me list some of the other reasons why.
1. Platini has spent eight years at FIFA’s top table, becoming a member of the Executive Committee in 2007. In that time we had not heard one word uttered by him that might have suggested a genuine concern about corruption. Yet the sleaze and graft went on all around him. He did nothing. Like Blatter all he seemed to be concerned with was personal ambition and his political powerbase.
2. I first began to suspect Platini’s motives in 2009 when he sided with Bahrain’s Sheikh Salman, who wanted to oust Mohammed Bin Hammam from a FIFA exco seat in an election. The reason was obvious: Platini wanted to be FIFA’s next president and in that quest Bin Hammam was a rival. In an investigative report SBS uncovered attempts at vote buying from Salman’s side but that didn’t seem to bother Michel.
3. As is public knowledge, in 2010 . Why he did that, when the FIFA inspection report gave Qatar the lowest rating of all bidders, he has not been able to adequately explain. He did mutter something about wanting to bring the World Cup to the Middle East but that is a hollow claim. If he was genuine in that cause he would have tried to persuade the Qataris to share the event among a number of other Gulf states and not hold it just in Qatar, a country with an area of 11,500 square kilometres, not quite the size of Sydney.
After the vote Platini was a prime mover of shifting the tournament to the Qatari winter but that misses the point. When he voted he did vote for a summer World Cup, which would have seen professional footballers, of which he was once one, running around in 50 degree temperatures. Visiting fans walking the streets would have fried.
More plausible is the explanation offered in the book The Ugly Game, written by two Sunday Times investigative journalists. Their account claims Platini, just prior to the vote, had dinner with French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the Emir of Qatar at the Élysée Palace. At the dinner, the book claims, the Emir courted Platini’s vote and in return offered to bail out the financially strapped Paris Saint-Germain, Platini’s favourite club, and take the French football rights away from Canal+, the TV channel Platini despised. Subsequently the Qataris bought PSG and launched the sports channel beIN SPORTS, which went on to pay a hefty sum for a share of the Ligue 1 rights.
4. Also suspicious is the affair surrounding Michel’s son, Laurent Platini. Less than a year after Michel voted for Qatar the young man was employed by Qatar Sports Investments, the owner of PSG and which in turn is owned by the Qatari royal family. Laurent is now the CEO of Burrda Sports, a sports equipment company owned by the same group. Laurent’s dad claims there is no connection but if you suspect he’s telling porky pies you are not alone.
5. Then there is Watchgate, or precisely the scandal over FIFA exco members accepting $25,000 Parmigiani watches as gifts from the Brazilian World Cup organisers in 2014. Accepting such gifts is in clear breach of paragraph 20 of the FIFA Code of Ethics, which stipulates that gifts must only be of symbolic or trivial value. Three exco members returned the watches immediately but the rest, Platini among them, did not. Indeed Platini got quite stroppy when FIFA publicly directed all its exco members to return the watches and loudly criticised the body for the directive, saying he refuses to give the watch back. Eventually he did but it took many months.
6. Also worrying is Platini’s enduring support for Angel Villar Llona. The Spaniard is currently under a probe by FIFA’s ethics investigators concerning allegations of vote swapping with Qatar when his country was a joint bidder with Portugal to host the 2018 World Cup. In early 2014 Villar Llona was named in the media as one of a handful of FIFA exco members who tried to shut down ethics chief Michael Garcia’s investigation into the bids, an investigation with which Villar Llona flatly refused to co-operate. Despite being a fierce opponent of reform, Villar Llona continues to enjoy Platini’s support and is tipped to take over as UEFA president in the event the Frenchman wins the FIFA post in February.
7. Very murky is the case of the recent Greek match-fixing scandal involving one of the country’s giant clubs, current champion Olympiacos, whose owner Evangelos Marinakis had to pay 200,000 Euros as bail to avoid going to jail and has been banned from all football related activities. Despite the scandal and the doubts over Olympiacos having won the Greek Super League legitimately, UEFA, of which Platini is president, has ruled that Olympiacos should be allowed to participate in the current season of the UEFA Champions League.
Add to that the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG) opening proceedings against Blatter on suspicion of criminal mismanagement and misappropriation, with the Swiss accussed of Blatter is also accused of making a a "disloyal payment" to Platini in 2011 in relation to work carried out by him between 1999 and 2002 - when the Frenchman was a special advisor to the 79-year-old.
Five months out from FIFA’s presidential elections Platini still hasn’t published his manifesto and his vision for football’s governing body. We await eagerly the day he finally does.
Will he set a believable road map for reform? If so what will that reform agenda look like? What will be its breadth? Or will he just be content with becoming an executive, salaried president, just like his predecessor, with all the sweeping powers such a position wields? If that happens Blatter’s exit will not have brought much of a change.
I was, and still am, a fan of Michel Platini the technical reformer. His reforms, among them banning the back-pass to the goalkeeper, doing away with passive off-side, outlawing tackles from behind, awarding three instead of two points for a win, have made football a far better spectacle.
But on the administration side he is not a natural reformer. His track record shows him to be an ambitious man with a flagrant disregard for what is right and for the game’s desperate need not just to be clean but to be seen to be clean.
He is not fit to be FIFA president.
