Former Uefa president – caught between moving on and settling scores – talks candidly about his downfall, Infantino and the snakepit of the game’s governance
“T
here 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.”
