Michel Platini is no revolutionary, but a hindrance to true change at corrupt Fifa. The game that he purports to love deserves better, writes Oliver Brown
Old boys' network: Michael Platini (right) and Sepp Blatter (left) are cut from the same cloth Photo: AFP
By Oliver Brown
If Michel Platini is the answer, then Fifa truly has not the faintest clue what the problem is. The president of Uefa is so enmeshed in the putrid power structures in Zurich that he offers not, as he has the brass neck to claim, a “breath of fresh air” to clean up the most powerful office in the game, but a toxic taint by association.
Nobody who is serious about bringing transparency to the Fifa presidency needs four days to explain why it took nine years for him to be paid £1.3 million by Sepp Blatter for some nebulous consultancy work. Nobody who is gullible enough to believe Fifa’s absurd explanation that they could not afford to pay him, at a time when they were running a budget surplus of over £50 million and doling out expenses like confetti, can be entrusted with any hope of reform. Nobody whose offices in Nyon could yet be raided by the Swiss police, who is labelled by the country’s attorney-general as “somewhere between a witness and an accused person” in the case of Blatter’s mystery payment, can be deemed a worthy candidate to take football forward.
The front page of France Football on Wednesday, appealing to the constituency where Platini is most revered, spoke volumes. “Platini: The Doubt,” the headline screamed, the face of Blatter’s heir presumptive superimposed on a pane of shattered glass. Already, with the presidential election still four months away, the cult of personality that Platini has so delicately crafted is fracturing before us. No longer is the romanticised image of ‘Le Roi’ – the wonderful player, the boyishly enthusiastic football-lover, the hail-fellow-well-met figure who throws his arm around Greg Dyke – sufficient to sustain his campaign when there is such a glaring deficit of trust.
Our own Football Association, who met on Wednesday to reconsider their endorsement of Platini, have some pressing questions to answer. Why, when he was a party to Blatter’s ghastly system of patronage, did they rubber-stamp his credentials so readily? Why were they seduced by his diplomatic charms more easily than the lady, she of the fluttering eyelashes, in that Ferrero Rocher advert? “Mr Ambassador, you are really spoiling us…” Dyke’s pronouncements on the FA’s behalf, lamenting the creep of Fifa corruption while desperately trying to exculpate his good friend Michel, are becoming increasingly preposterous.
The problem with Platini, who is fluent in five languages, is he speaks none of them so brilliantly as he does Fifa-ese. The further he is drawn into Blatter’s tangled web, the more he reaches for this hideous argot of evasion and obfuscation. “I was pleased to have been able to clarify all matters,” he said in a statement, within hours of the Swiss launching their criminal investigation. Well, apart from the trifling matter of that deferred payment, of course. The best he could come up with, on the fifth day of asking, was that Fifa were incapable of remunerating him.
Platini seriously expects his detractors to believe that an organisation that pays its executive committee members £350 per diems for even fractional days worked cannot muster a measly £1.3 million on time? Just think, this is barely half the amount that Fifa lavished on delegates’ accommodation at their Mauritius congress in 2013. No company on the planet has a BACS system so useless as to take nine years to reimburse a contractor. Unless, perhaps, Fifa had sent Platini his money using a carrier pigeon with a broken leg.
Barely a line of his defence makes sense. His notion of a cash-strapped Fifa is contradicted by the governing body’s own accounts, which describe the period from 1999 to 2002 – when his work for Blatter was carried out – as one of “considerable financial success”. And however earnest Platini’s protests are to the contrary, the fact that he finally took receipt of this money in February 2011, immediately prior to throwing his weight behind Blatter’s quest for re-election, is far too striking a coincidence to ignore.
Platini is not a new broom, but a dismal throwback to the old boys’ network. He is an agent in the Fifa malaise, rather than an answer to it. Indeed, the closer one examines the make-up of Fifa four months on from those dawn raids at the Baur au Lac, the more paper-thin its commitment to change appears. If they were to suspend Blatter today, for example, who would they end up with as interim president? None other than Issa Hayatou, the same figure who had to be disciplined by the International Olympic Committee in 2011 for allegedly receiving kickbacks.
Even the inquiry into Blatter himself seems strangled at birth. It is led by Robert Torres, who as chief justice in the Pacific island of Guam is more likely to protect turtle colonies than he is to uncover vast malfeasance in the world’s largest sport. He, in turn, reports directly to Hans-Joachim Eckhart, the Munich judge responsible for the whitewash of Michael Garcia’s report on the Qatar World Cup bid.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The situation at Fifa is so ludicrous that the besieged Blatter can only address his staff through his lawyers. At this rate, he might like to go full Julian Assange and ask the Russian Embassy in Berne if they have a room spare. With each passing day, Fifa’s headquarters becomes more like the setting for an episode ofCSI: Zurich, one where a certain Monsieur Platini has more of a starring role than he would care to acknowledge. Platini is no revolutionary, but a hindrance to true change. The game that he purports to love deserves far better.
By Oliver Brown
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