“There are millions and millions of romantics in football,” Michel Platini says. He has been asked whether, after a decade frozen out of the game, its lustre has vanished for him. “Millions who share the ideas that I have. But in the end, it’s big business.”
It is an industry whose peaks Platini scaled before, in one of football’s biggest falls from grace, it spat him out. He maintains he would have become Fifa president if he had not been banned from football over an alleged unlawful payment made to him in 2011, when he was running Uefa, by Sepp Blatter. The scandal led to a criminal case but both men were acquitted for a second time, definitively so, by a Swiss appeals court last year. Nothing hangs over Platini any more, bar a conviction that he was cheated.
“It’s a strange feeling,” he says. “The last 10 years have been very complicated because of what my family suffered: they see what’s in the papers, what people say about you, the global discussion. But I was never preoccupied about the final decision because I knew I was not guilty, knew that at the end there would be nothing. I always felt fine in myself.”
Now that is a matter of public record and the question is whether, at 70, Platini has more to give at football’s elite level. The sport has moved on and his nine years as Uefa president feel a lifetime ago. He was the triple Ballon d’Or winner who leapt into the snakepit of football governance and emerged with his reputation sullied.
Platini once compared himself with Icarus and, however one views the events that brought him down, there is little doubt he skirted the sun. His demise came when, nine years later, he called in a £1.35m payment for work carried out as Blatter’s technical adviser between 1999 and 2002. Both men said the deal had been made verbally and that there was an innocent reason for the delay. When it came to light in September 2015, Blatter had agreed to step down from a scandal-hit Fifa and Platini was expected to succeed him.
“I was destined to become president of Fifa,” he says. “Everything happened because they didn’t want that. The ban was a big injustice and overall it was political. A group of people decided to kill me.”
But who? That has never been explicit, although he thinks Blatter, raging against the dying of the light, “wanted to die in that job”. Platini believes this, along with his own standing as a former player with a new broom, set events in motion. “It created an atmosphere against me,” he says, speaking from his home in the south of France. “This administration, people who I did not know, didn’t want a different president. The soup was very good, they could earn a lot of money, and they didn’t want me in case I changed many things. They were afraid of me.”
He does not include Gianni Infantino, back then a competent and fiercely ambitious Uefa general secretary, among those who knifed him even though Platini filed a complaint against his former colleague in 2021 accusing him of influence-peddling in the corruption case. That case was closed last October after special prosecutors cleared Infantino. It was Infantino, not Platini, who succeeded Blatter in February 2016. “No, he profited from the situation but was not one of the instigators,” he says. “Infantino wanted to be president of Uefa, which meant he was pushing me towards Fifa.”
Mention of Infantino leads to a discourse on modern-day football governance. Some ongoing controversies, such as Fifa’s peace prize award to Donald Trump and the political ingratiation tied up in it, almost seem quaint in comparison with the Blatter era.
“He was a good No 2, but is not a good No 1,” Platini says of Infantino. “He worked very well at Uefa but he has one problem: he likes the rich and powerful people, the ones with money. It’s his character. He was like that as a No 2, but back then he was not the boss.”
Despite the numerous scandals that eventually engulfed Fifa under Blatter, his friend turned adversary, Platini believes the organisation has turned further away from its values. “Unfortunately Infantino has become more of an autocrat since the pandemic,” he says. “I think he lost the game. There is less democracy than in Blatter’s time. You can say what you want about Blatter, but his main problem is that he wanted to continue at Fifa for life. He was a good person for football.
“The administrators in football now, they are just doing their job. You find many who wouldn’t care whether it’s football or basketball. It’s not always a case of loving football if you work at Uefa or Fifa.”
What, then, of Aleksander Ceferin? The Slovenian succeeded Platini, banned by then, at the Uefa helm in September 2016 and there is no denying the pair are starkly different. A statesman of the game, a winner of almost everything, had been replaced by a lawyer with relatively brief high-level experience in football.
Platini is careful not to criticise Ceferin, save for observing that the eternal to and fro between Uefa and Fifa needs tighter management. A group of Uefa delegates walked out of the Fifa Congress in Asuncion last May in protest at the “private political interests” that led Infantino to arrive late but, publicly at least, the flashpoint was quickly smoothed over.
“Ceferin has to be more present in Fifa,” he says. “Uefa was always something important: it was a counterbalance to the silly things done by Fifa. You have to be more energetic in defending the values of football. I have no contact with him and don’t want to interfere, but I think it is the only way to stop Infantino doing some stupid things.”
He believes the role of Uefa president will become “more complicated”. That owes largely to the increased power wielded by leading clubs. In his time Platini was forced to make regular compromises to keep members of the European Club Association, in whose establishment he was influential, from following through on threats to break away. In practice it largely meant allowing bigger clubs a greater share of the Champions League pot and he was sometimes accused of being too hands-off. Relaunched glossily in October as European Football Clubs and hugely expanded, the ECA’s heft in shaping the sport has never been greater.
“They always wanted to organise their own competition from the beginning but I didn’t let them, I fought against that for many years,” he says of the body then headed up by Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. Ceferin was leading Uefa when a fully-fledged European Super League attempt fell apart in 2021, but Platini senses the threat has not remotely abated.
“It’s been a problem for a long, long time and it will become more and more important,” he says. “It would be like a league of 18 clubs, the rich and the big. What happened with the Club World Cup last summer may be the tip of the iceberg. I have no idea what it will do for the future of the game, but I think there could be a big change in professional football in Europe.”
A central theme for Platini is the notion that football has been taken away from those who understand the sport. He contrasts Rummenigge, his old sparring partner, with the EFC chair, Nasser al-Khelaifi, extolling the benefits of talking issues through with “someone who knew what football is”. Infantino has twice been re-elected at Fifa unopposed; there is no obvious candidate either to run against Ceferin next year, assuming he ends a prolonged tease by deciding to seek another term.
“My best hope is that more and more ex-players will come into football governance so that they can organise these institutions and take care of the game internationally,” he says. “It’s what I am, and it’s what I did.
“It’s not an easy job so there aren’t many who want to do it. You have to campaign tirelessly and it costs a lot of money. But for democracy it would be better if there was good competition with new ideas. It’s not always a question of football, it’s a question of the people involved.”
Does he feel his own race is run? At the conclusion of his football ban in 2021 he was linked strongly with a role at Fifpro, the global players’ union. In the past year there have been murmurings on the European circuit that Platini, if not preparing his own Uefa comeback, would happily play a role in supporting fresh blood.
He becomes coy. “I don’t feel so bad, I have 10 years to do something. I have some ideas, some big things that will be complicated, so if I create something important I will need some time. If I have a good opportunity to advise someone or something, why not? But not anymore in the administration of football. I’ve been public-facing for 50 years so it’s time to be in the background.”
Despite the intense frustration of a derailed career, and the lengths to which he has been to clear his name, he does not consider the previous decade to have been lost. “No, no, I’ve enjoyed my life and enjoyed this time. Mentally I was calm. I travelled a lot, discovered new things and people, spent more time with friends and family. I didn’t lose anything.”
That includes the support of most people inside football, he believes. “I was treated very well by the fans, by football people, but not by ones who were afraid I would come back and take their seats,” he says. “Everyone else understood from the beginning that it was a plot that I would not become Fifa president.
“With the media it was different because they need Fifa, they don’t need me, and there was a big lobbying system of lawyers and other people. That world was against me and they didn’t want me to come back.”
In November Platini filed a lawsuit in Paris against three unnamed Fifa officials, and an unnamed member of a Swiss judicial institution, accusing them of defamation over statements made while he fought his case. From the outside he looks caught between moving on and settling old scores.
“I won’t give in to those who made bad things, lies and false accusations against me,” he says. “This will not be revenge: it is a fight for truth against those who did these things; there is always energy to battle injustice. I don’t want someone else to have the same problems as me one day.”
How would a Fifa run by Platini have looked? “It would have become an organisation that cares about football, not making politics,” he says. Surely he should know better than most that immersion in one tends to mean deep involvement in the other. “I think romanticism can help the pragmatics, but pragmatism does not help the romantics.”
It is a riddle nobody, not least Platini, has yet been able to solve.
