The FBI and Fifa ethics committee had come for all these former allies whom Sepp Blatter had supported for years, but largely he had been unmoved and said it did not reflect on him, because he was unaware of their wrongdoing and had no part in it. He had worked eagerly at Havelange’s side for twenty-three years, made it as an unlikely, unpresidential-looking character to outflank the attacks of Johansson for the presidency in 1998, then flourished through seventeen years and five elections. He had survived the dossier amassed against him by his own secretary general, Zen-Ruffinen, in 2002, and the exposure of the ISL bribes in 2013. Now a ferociously well-resourced, lengthy US criminal investigation had not produced the name Blatter on any indictment, charged with any offence. He had agreed to step down due to the intolerable pressure, and because even he recognised his time was up. But it would be at his choosing, designated for February 2016, with a legacy of reform in place, when he, unblemished, could retire to acclaim. So when the Swiss criminal authorities and Fifa ethics committee finally came for him, Sepp Blatter was disbelieving, indignant to his core. The evidence they had, to finally overthrow a president of forty years’ tenacity, would also sweep away his likely and once-chosen successor: the former playing genius turned Uefa president, Michel Platini. For Platini, just when his time had finally arrived to step up to the Fifa presidency and attain the summit of a starry career he believed was his destiny, this would be a catastrophic fall, and humiliation.
It was the attorney general in Switzerland, the country so long accused of leniency towards the sports bodies it shelters, who emerged brandishing the piece of paper which felled the presidents of Fifa and Uefa. On 25 September 2015, attorney general, Michael Lauber, made a brief, lethal announcement: that he was investigating a 2m CHF payment from Fifa, made on Blatter’s instruction, to Platini, in February 2011. That was just three months before the vote in which Blatter had been standing again to be the Fifa president against Mohamed bin Hammam, an election in which Platini supported Blatter and encouraged Uefa’s fifty-three European FAs to do the same. This was neat, and devastating, and it turned out to be rooted in the very beginnings of Blatter and Platini’s entanglement in football politics, seventeen years earlier.
Blatter, Lauber announced, had been ‘interrogated’ as a suspect of criminal mismanagement, and Platini interviewed as ‘a person asked to provide information’, a particular status in Swiss law. Both men said, extraordinarily, that the 2m CHF was Platini’s back pay, for that dimly remembered stint Platini had served as Fifa’s football adviser after Blatter won the 1998 election. Still a glittering figure then, from his feats as a player, then France coach, then lead organiser of his country’s triumphant 1998 World Cup, Platini had lent stardust to the secretary general’s hustings and been given that job afterwards. Blatter had then supported his man, who believed he was on a promise to succeed him one day, to be elected on to the Uefa executive committee in 2002. Then in 2007 Platini, with Blatter’s political support, moved in to oppose and replace Blatter’s rival, Johansson, as Uefa president. Since that first election, Platini had eased comfortably into the role, status and politics as Uefa president, was elected for another term in 2011, then again in March 2015 after it became clear Blatter was digging in at Fifa. Platini was biding his time to move across from Lake Geneva to Lake Zurich, and after the traumatised Blatter had finally announced he would step down, Platini, on 29 July 2015, had actually declared himself a candidate to succeed him.
Yet here it was, this sudden bombshell, that while he was the Uefa president Platini had been paid 2m CHF on Fifa president Blatter’s order, shortly before the 2011 Fifa election. And Platini was claiming it was money he was owed for the job he did at Blatter’s side which finished fully nine years earlier. It looked awful for both of them, and it turned out to be awful for both of them.
It was established very quickly that Platini had no written employment contract with Fifa for the 2m CHF he had been paid. He had worked as Blatter’s football adviser, and as the deputy chairman of the newly established GOAL programme alongside bin Hammam, for a contract paying him 300,000 CHF a year. As the ethics committee and the Court of Arbitration for Sport would both state, there was no documentation or written note, evidence of any sort, for a further 2m CHF to be payable. Both Blatter and Platini claimed they had made an ‘oral agreement’ back in 1998 that he would in fact be paid 1m CHF a year, but that Blatter had only felt able to pay 300,000 CHF of it at that time, so had owed a further 700,000 CHF a year.
The reason, both Blatter and Platini claimed, was that Zen-Ruffinen, the then secretary general who turned whistleblower and Blatter’s accuser, was only being paid 300,000 CHF. Blatter said he agreed to pay Platini 1m CHF, but could not be seen to pay him three times more than Zen-Ruffinen, so had said they should defer the remaining 700,000 CHF a year. In the actual contract, which I have seen, the salary figure was left blank, and Blatter had handwritten it, in blue pen: 300,000 CHF.
Platini claimed he had not been paid the extra money he was owed because Fifa was having financial difficulties in 2002 following ISL’s collapse, and he did not need it. He let it be known that he is not a man interested in money, having always had plenty of it all his life since he started earning as a midfield prodigy at Nancy aged seventeen. He went off to his new life and upward ascent of the Uefa elevator without giving it a great deal of thought, he said; he had been owed money often in his life and did not greatly pursue it.
Then, years after the work at Fifa finished, when he had moved a great deal further on in football’s political system and was Uefa president, in 2011 Platini had suddenly decided to go back to Blatter and ask for this money he was owed. He said he actually underclaimed, because he forgot he had only been paid 300,000 CHF a year; he had thought it had been 500,000 CHF, so he was only still owed 500,000 CHF for each of his four years at Fifa rather than 700,000 CHF. Hence his demand for 2m CHF, rather than 2.8m CHF.
Platini tried to set out this version of events, and his innocence, in an interview for Le Monde in France, where it was most important to him to safeguard his cherished reputation and national hero status. In it, he said:
‘Je ne suis pas un homme d’argent.’ (I am not a man obsessed by money.)
Seeking to explain why he didn’t ask for the money he claimed he was owed until nine years after the work he did was finished he said:
‘I didn’t ask for the money because I didn’t miss it. I started earning money at 17 years old. I didn’t even know it was possible in football [then]. I remember my father [Aldo Platini, who also had a bar and ran the local football team in Joeuf, the mining town where Michel grew up] who was a maths teacher, he couldn’t believe it either and he asked at Nancy: “And you are going to give him money to play?”
‘I have kept those values,’ Platini claimed. ‘L’argent, j’en ai assez.’ (Money, I have enough.)
He invited Le Monde’s journalist, Raphaelle Bacque, to ask his wife whether it was true that he does not care about money or look at his bank account, and Bacque noted that Christèle Platini, who was sitting in on the interview at their duplex apartment in the village of Genolier near Geneva, agreed by rolling her eyes in mock exasperation.
Platini’s matey, banterous, working man way of expressing himself had won him friends and influenced people all along his journey, where he had seemed a greatly refreshing, authentic football man among the suits and blazers of commercialised European football. He had waved away concerns about his vote for Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup while admitting he changed his mind after his lunch at the Élysée Palace with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Emir of Qatar. Platini maintained that Sarkozy had not asked him directly to vote for Qatar, and he had made his own mind up. He voted for Qatar, he reiterated to Le Monde in this interview, because he thought a World Cup across the Gulf in the winter would be ‘magnifique’–even though the vote was for a summer World Cup and no other Gulf country except Qatar will be a host. He dismissed with the same bar-room insouciance the questions about his son, Laurent, having been recruited by the kit company Burrda, which was owned by Qatar Sports Investments, after Platini did cast his vote for Qatar. That had nothing to do with it, Platini insisted; it was a year and a half after the vote, and he did not intervene in his son’s life:
‘Il n’y a aucun conflit d’intérêts,’ (There was no conflict of interest at all) Platini stated.
This 2m CHF payment, however, was discovered and had come to be considered by serious authorities in a newly forensic climate of arrests, indictments and a massive clampdown on financial wrongdoing at Fifa. It was a proper, formidable test of that payment’s legitimacy, money passed between the holders of football’s two highest offices, and of Platini’s man-in-the-dressing-room approach to football, money and politics.
Platini gave a consistent account of his alliance with Blatter. He said Blatter first approached him in 1998 at a hotel in Singapore, when Platini was joint president of the 1998 France World Cup organising committee, for which he said he did not get paid. He said Blatter asked him then if he planned to stand for Fifa president, because João Havelange had suggested it, saying: ‘Platini as president and Blatter as secretary general, would be a very elegant solution.’
Platini just took it as flattery; he was only starting in the game’s political snakes and ladders, still quite fresh from playing and coaching. In his telling of his story, he declined Blatter’s approach, then Blatter said: ‘I will stand, but I need you.’ And Platini then entered an immediate embrace with the master of manoeuvres, Blatter, twenty-four years in this game at Fifa by then, with experience before that, too.
Lars-Christer Olsson, the Swedish secretary general at Uefa who worked for Johansson, describes Blatter as a brilliant political strategist. He would be stunned and appalled at Blatter’s virtuosity at politics when he saw him flourish it in 2007. Blatter had initially supported Johansson as the candidate to serve another term, as the best character to protect and develop European football. Olsson, a long-term ally and admirer of Johansson’s, believing him to have good values of governance for football, saw Blatter’s support warn off other potential challengers, and believed it also lulled Johansson into a sense of security. Then, in November 2006, a late stage before the elections in the spring, Blatter declared his backing for Platini, his ally. Olsson was so dismayed that he pledged he would resign if Platini won the election. When that did happen, Olsson did resign.
‘Blatter was very shrewd,’ Olsson says, ‘he was a very clever politician in that way, technically good, a strategist, and he always landed on his feet. I thought it was so wrong and against good governance, I believed that the Fifa president should not intervene in other elections, so I resigned as my way to support Lennart Johansson. Blatter was always nice to the losers afterwards; he was clever in that way, too. And he groomed Michel Platini in the politics.’
Platini lent his name and fame to support Blatter, and after the win in Paris, Blatter offered Platini the job of football adviser. At the same time Jérôme Champagne, a former French diplomat with a high-achieving CV, who had been head of protocols for the France 1998 World Cup, hosting the heads of state and other dignitaries, was recruited as Blatter’s international adviser. Platini, the star who grafted his way to the very top of football with Juventus and as captain of his country, with his professed man-of-the-people roots, seems never to have taken to Champagne, the highly educated career diplomat working in the elaborate international relations of Fifa.
Platini claims that when they discussed money for the role, Blatter asked him how much he wanted to be paid, and he replied: ‘One million.’ Then that Blatter replied: ‘Of what?’ and Platini, in his telling, says he replied that he did not care which currency it was: ‘Whatever you like,’ he says he told Blatter: ‘Roubles, pounds, dollars.’ He said Blatter had replied: ‘OK: 1m Swiss francs a year.’
Blatter tells the same story, that Platini asked for ‘a million’, but didn’t specify the currency, and Blatter decided it should be Swiss francs, although Platini worked from an office in Paris, not at Fifa in Zurich.
Jean-Philippe Leclaire, the editorial director of L’Équipe and author of the Platini biography, Platoche: Gloire et déboires d’un héros français (The glory and woes of a French hero), believes the one million figure does have some significance, and that it reveals Platini’s attitude to money was a little more insistent than laissez-faire. When he was still a young player, aged twenty-two, at Nancy, Platini played for France in midfield at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, including in the 2–1 defeat to Italy in the first group match. After the World Cup, Inter Milan were interested in signing him and they had talks. Platini was still on only a modest salary, the story goes, but when the chairman of Nancy heard Platini had been talking to the giant Italian club, he halved the player’s salary.
‘After that, Platini promised it would never happen again,’ Leclaire says. When Platini moved up the football ladder, from Nancy to St Étienne, he asked for 1m francs a year.
‘He is a family guy and he is not flash with his money,’ Leclaire says, ‘but he sees it as his value, a way his talent is recognised.’
The title of the book, Platoche, a jokey, not particularly reverential nickname for Platini, Leclaire explains as the French attitude to arguably the country’s greatest ever football man, his generation’s Zinedine Zidane. ‘He is a French hero and we see through him the development of football in France, but we don’t worship our heroes,’ Leclaire says. ‘The nickname is a way people are brought down to earth. The Italians, when he was at Juventus, called Platini “le roi” [‘the king’]; the French didn’t.’
Platini did work for Blatter from the office in Paris, advising on the football calendar, distributing development projects to the poorer associations in those first transformative years of the GOAL project, and accompanying Blatter on his travels, which Platini is said not to have particularly relished. In 2002, he left, with Blatter’s support, to sit on the executive committee at Uefa, where the president and senior representatives around the table had fought so bloodily to unseat Blatter at Fifa, without success.
After he beat Johansson in the 2007 election, I interviewed Platini for the Guardian that autumn, at Uefa’s headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland. The building is attractively modern, with clean lines and open spaces of wood, glass and chrome, like a designer cabin on the banks of Lake Geneva. Platini was new in the job and he seemed to brim with energy and genuine enthusiasm for nurturing football in Europe, which had so gilded his life. He told me that although he had been a great and well-paid player, he learned his ‘conviction and philosophy’ from the coaching he saw his father do for the love of it in their small town of Joeuf, and from their base in the bar. His mission at Uefa, he told me, was to maintain the soul of football in the era of mega-money: ‘To protect the game from business.’
He talked about the investors arriving to buy English Premier League clubs, like the Glazer family, from the US, who bought Manchester United in 2005 and leveraged the club with their £525m bank debts, and said he was ‘afraid’ of the effect it would have on the game.
‘My philosophy is that football is popular because of the identity of the clubs, because the people of Manchester played the people of Liverpool, and the fans take care because the clubs belong to the people. Now, because football is popular, people are coming to take control of this popularity, to make money. That is not correct. I don’t like that.’
It was a message I and many people wanted to hear, at a time in English football when money was dominant, and the FA had allowed historic, beloved football clubs to be bought and sold as financial investments. Platini and his advisers had not yet developed into coherent policies his protests about business, and the ‘ultra-liberalisme’ of the English and Premier League approach, but they would soon produce the ‘financial fair play’ rules, at least to stem the losses clubs were making across Europe. The rules were then criticised for themselves cementing the power of the big clubs which made most money, but they prevented a further round of hyper-wage and transfer fee inflation fuelled by oil-rich owners buying clubs, as Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich had at Chelsea in 2003, Sheikh Mansour at Manchester City in 2008 and Qatar Sports Investments at Paris Saint-Germain, after Platini’s lunch with Sarkozy, in 2010. It is true that Platini did not really reshape European football and curb its exploitation as a business; gradually the big clubs garnered more influence with him, but he seemed in those early months genuinely committed to trying.
He had won his election in the classic, Havelange and Blatter-patented manner at international federations, by appealing to the votes of the smaller countries, as he illustrated to me:
‘My job is to develop the football in Europe, for the youth–to help the children of Georgia, Armenia, Lithuania to enjoy the game. The smallest associations do not receive money from the governments; that’s finished. Only from Fifa or Uefa or the richer countries. If we don’t give money, mini-pitches, footballs, they can’t play, it’s finished. My job is not the games between Arsenal and Manchester but between the smaller clubs; that’s more important, and that’s football. The day when I don’t take care of that, I leave.’
I asked him about his rapid rise in football administration, his alliance with Blatter, which was still fresh and strong then, and he portrayed it as a continuum with his fabulous career as a player, leaving no doubt that he believed he would one day be president of Fifa, too:
‘It was destiny. When I stopped being coach of the [French] national team in 1992 I had the opportunity through President Mitterrand to be co-chairman of the World Cup in France. And because I was co-chairman, I began to have a rapport with Havelange and Blatter. Then in ’98 Mr Blatter asked me to help him to be president of Fifa and I went inside this way, and at the end of being the adviser of Mr Blatter, I decided you are more influential if you are elected and I was elected in Fifa and Uefa and at the end, I decided to stand to be the president. And now I am here, by the Lac de Genève… It was the destiny, the fatality that I went through this.’
About his quite uniquely successful journey and segue from playing and coaching into top administrative roles, which so few former footballers have ever managed to secure, Platini again said it was his fate to reach the top, that he was a natural leader:
‘I was not captain of Juve, but [I was] of France, and every team. Some people are born leaders at certain ages, five, or fifty-two. I used to organise games in my street, four against four, or sometimes it was one against four because I was too strong. Then I organised games for my clubs, then for France, then Uefa; it comes straight from my youth, my jeunesse. A professional habit–don’t send me a psychologist to understand why I am a leader. It was my destiny, I wanted to do something, I am afraid of what happened to football and I think we need to come back to the game.’
Presenting his credentials as an ideal character to be in charge, he opined: ‘If I was a football fan, then I would be very happy that a football person is finally in charge of a football house. Because we are not a bank, or a tribunal, or a political, or a stock exchange, we are a house of football.’
Asked about Blatter, and their relationship, he described him as a man who also cared about football and who grappled manfully with the political complexities of a global organisation. He included an intriguing assessment of the ‘morality’ and culture of people in the Fifa executive committee, which he claimed was different from the ethics of Europeans:
‘Blatter is a good football man… I know him very well, I stayed with him a long time; he’s a guy who loves football and who loves players. The people have to know that, but I am sure they know. Those who are with Sepp in the executive committee, many times they don’t share our philosophy, our morality, our policies because they are coming from another world, another morality. Sepp is in the middle of everybody and he has to take care politically of many people.
‘It’s easier for me because in Europe we have broadly the same philosophies, but in many other countries the culture is totally different–the president for political reasons has to take care of it. That is why he is not so popular.’
As the Uefa president, Platini said he would not be moving against Blatter, as his predecessor had:
‘Now it is a benefit that Uefa has a president who is close to Fifa and we can come together,’ he said. ‘I know him, perhaps he will defend the interests of Fifa and I will defend interests of Uefa, we will never share all ideas, but it will be in a positive way and we will work to find a solution. It will not be a war. We will share the values of football–I don’t want to take his place, as Uefa wanted to do in 1998.’
As the years wore on and the politics of football became Platini’s life rather than a bonus of destiny, he seemed to lose some of that vim and lustre. You would see him in his Uefa blazer at the European Champions League draw or other event in the sunshine, and he could seem gloomier, sometimes sulky, the throwaway one-liners still there, but his character sunk in the tedium of administration. He seemed more sucked in, at times, to the politics of his organisation and Blatter’s, rather than being able to maintain his focus throughout as the pure football man, and there were fewer leaps of progressive reform.
The happy partnership with Blatter and Fifa did not survive many years either; once Platini was no longer at his side but heading the most powerful confederation, the political rivalry of Uefa inevitably reasserted itself. For Blatter, who had dedicated his adult life to achieving and maintaining his position of Fifa president, the status was a precious prize, and perceived slights revealed how fragile he could feel it was. As early into Platini’s Uefa presidency as the summer of 2008, Blatter fell out with him because at the opening ceremony of the European Championships his designated seat was eight along from the Swiss president.
In an outburst to the Russian news agency TASS, given in October 2015 after both men were suspended for ninety days while the Fifa ethics committee considered the 2m CHF payment, Blatter attacked Platini for ‘envy and jealousy’, and recalled that seating plan which he considered a snub:
‘After he was elected Uefa president in 2007… one year we were the best friends,’ Blatter said. ‘And one year later in the 2008 European Championship in Switzerland and Austria I was sidelined by Uefa. And since then I never went to Uefa competitions because it’s non-respect, not to me as a person but to the office and the people I represent. He could not [explain it]. Uefa is affected by anti-Fifa virus for years. They have an anti-Fifa virus.’
Blatter also attacked Platini for wanting to be Fifa president but not having the backbone to stand against him. In his interview with Le Monde, Platini was emollient, and revealing, when asked about his relationship with Blatter:
‘I had respect, friendship,’ he said. His wife, Christèle, spoke up to remind him that he admired Blatter. ‘Yes, I admired the politician. He had a lot of charm… Although he wanted to kill me politically, I still have a little affection for what we achieved together.’
Yet in that long interview, in which Platini concertedly put on the record for France his good intentions, homespun philosophy and lack of care for money, there was no actual explanation for why he suddenly decided to ask for 2m CHF from Blatter so many years after he left his employ.
He first asked for the money on 26 February 2010, telling Markus Kattner, Fifa’s deputy secretary general and chief financial officer, that he was still owed it from his time at the organisation eight years earlier. At that time, he argued in his evidence when challenged about the timing, the Fifa presidential election was a long way off, so his request for the money could not be said to be related to it. In March 2010, at the Uefa congress in Tel Aviv, Platini was on record, before he was paid his money by Fifa, saying that he was happy at Uefa and wanted to stay on for a second term. That was true; he was enjoying the role, and the prestige and attention which came with it; he was comfortable and feted in Europe and was notching up achievements. It felt too soon to leave after only four years, and anyway Blatter was now unlikely to step down.
People close to Platini have said the most likely motivation for him requesting the money then was that Jérôme Champagne left, and received a large settlement, thought to have been more than €3m. Urs Linsi, the secretary general who replaced Zen-Ruffinen, had also left with a big payoff, although that had been in 2007. So, the suggestion is that Michel Platini recalled he was only paid 300,000 CHF a year (although he thought it had been 500,000 CHF) when he worked for Fifa, that he had an oral agreement to be paid 1m CHF, and that now, if people like Champagne were getting huge settlements, he should have the money he was owed.
That is not, it has to be said, a description of somebody who does not care about money. In fact, you could argue it is the opposite: the reaction of a man who cares robustly about it, who felt slighted when he saw what others got, and wanted more for himself. Perhaps it illustrates the attitude to money Leclaire believes Platini has: that it offended his sense of his own value to see Champagne paid so much. Champagne himself makes no apology at all for receiving a payoff; he said that he had his family to provide for, he worked hard at Fifa on difficult international governance problems, and believed his own sacking was political.
‘I have nothing to hide,’ he told me. ‘I had a contract with a determination that I would remain as long as Sepp Blatter was president. I was outraged to be fired for political reasons when I had done nothing wrong. The reality is that this is a post-rationalisation of Michel Platini’s own greed: he pretends not to care about money, and to only care about football.’
Platini asked again in June 2010, shortly before the World Cup in South Africa. When, on 2 December 2010, Platini voted for Qatar to host the 2022 tournament, Blatter, who believed he had secured the necessary support for the USA to host it, was, as he later acknowledged publicly, furious. Blatter began to make it clear that he would stand again for the Fifa presidency in 2011, and Mohamed bin Hammam, who felt this was a betrayal, asked Platini if he would mount a challenge. Platini had decided to stay at Uefa and was not going to stand against Blatter, and bin Hammam began to consider challenging himself.
In January 2011, Platini asked for the money once again. Blatter’s account of it is that Kattner referred the request to him, and he said Platini should send an invoice for what he was owed. So, to his ultimate great cost, Platini did; he put his request in writing. I have seen a copy of the invoice. It is headed at Platini’s address in Genolier, dated 17 January 2011, addressed to Kattner at the House of Fifa in Zurich. Platini titled it: ‘Re: salary payments 1998–9, 1999–0 [sic], 2000–1, 2001–2.’
It said, in English, this having been the agreed language of Fifa’s multi-lingual organisation for many years: ‘I would appreciate it if you would pay me the following salary payments for the four years in question, which were deferred by mutual agreement.’
Then Platini, Uefa president at the time, listed 500,000 CHF for each of the four years, a total of 2m CHF. Out of that, he said, Fifa should take care of his pension and other social security benefits. He put his bank details on the invoice.
Fifa paid him in February 2011. At that time, bin Hammam was becoming more serious about standing to challenge Blatter, and, just weeks later, on 18 March 2011, he did declare his candidacy as Fifa president, saying Blatter should not have stayed on beyond two terms, and famously promising ‘transparency’. Four days later at the Grand Palais in Paris, Platini was re-elected as Uefa’s president ‘by acclamation’ of its fifty-three national football associations, because nobody stood against him. He had promised to increase the money paid to national associations, from €408m in Uefa’s 2008–12 cycle, to almost €500m for 2012–16. Blatter made a guest speech at the congress, saying he was emotionally moved to be in Paris–because it reminded him that he had first won the Fifa presidency in the city in 1998. He thanked and praised Uefa and the strength of European football, and appealed for solidarity: ‘to fight all the little devils that exist in the world’.
Platini took a little time to announce which man he would support for the Fifa election, but ultimately the leader of fifty-three European football associations came down on Blatter’s side. When it was explosively revealed in 2015 that Blatter had authorised the 2m CHF to be paid him just weeks before that endorsement, the timing did not look pretty for either of them. The Swiss attorney general stated that his criminal investigation into Blatter was examining whether the 2m CHF was a ‘disloyal payment’, in serious breach of Blatter’s duties of trust to Fifa as its president. Platini’s status as ‘a person asked to provide information’ meant that he was not a criminal suspect, but that he had not been cleared either, and could become a suspect depending on the course of the investigation.
Neither man could at first believe the trouble they were in over this bit of business between them, which had been done with a proper invoice and gone through Fifa’s financial systems. On 8 October 2015, the ‘adjudicatory’ arm of the ethics committee, chaired by Judge Eckert, suspended both the presidents of Fifa and Uefa for ninety days, pending an investigation into the payment by the ‘investigatory’ arm chaired by Cornel Borbély, Garcia’s replacement.
Platini pleaded complete innocence over a payment he said he was owed for work done according to their oral agreement, and denied it was related in any way to his support for Blatter in the 2011 election. He still thought he could come through it, be cleared, and actually stand for the Fifa election in February 2016, in which he was the favourite to achieve his destiny and become president. Blatter, too, believed he had done nothing wrong, and would be restored to see an orderly handover in February, at which his legacy of eighteen years’ development, commercial success and reforms could be celebrated. He made a plea of innocence which he repeated several times in public, saying that he had always kept to advice his father had given him: ‘Don’t take any money that you haven’t earned, and pay your debts.’
But in this very self-contained issue, a 2m CHF payment, as with other scandals and criticisms of his period in charge, Blatter had not been accused of taking money. He was alleged to have improperly paid money to somebody else, to aid and serve his own advancement.
It was a major test for the ethics committee, and the impression of its independence, which Garcia had furiously questioned. Borbély’s investigators went to work on this issue which, by definition, had very little documentation to look into.
That was fatal to them. The ethics committee was not persuaded by either man’s account of an oral agreement. Borbély sent his report to Eckert, who delivered his decision on 21 December 2015, just in time for Blatter and Platini to have a crestfallen Christmas. They were both banned from all football activities for eight years, an unimaginable fall. The ethics committee looked at the money owed from the other way round, from what concrete evidence there was: a contract, which stated the salary as 300,000 CHF. There was therefore ‘no legal basis’ for the 2m CHF Platini was paid by Fifa in 2011, Eckert ruled. Platini is understood to have been asked by Vanessa Allard, a lawyer who conducted the ethics committee investigation, what he believed the validity was of the actual written contract, which noted a 300,000 CHF salary, if there was a side oral agreement for more. Nobody found the answer persuasive.
‘Neither in his written statement nor in his personal hearing was Mr Blatter able to demonstrate another legal basis for this payment,’ Eckert’s judgement stated. ‘[Both Blatter and Platini’s] assertion of an oral agreement was determined as not convincing and was rejected.’
The judgement cleared them of bribery and corruption, which was seriously considered by the ethics committee. In effect that was a finding that the 2m CHF was not a straightforward payment by Blatter to Platini to support him in the 2011 Fifa presidential election. But they threw four other breaches of the Fifa ethics code at them: finding them guilty of ‘offering and accepting gifts and other benefits’; having a conflict of interest; breaching their duty of loyalty, and breaches of the general rules of conduct.
‘Mr Blatter’s actions did not show commitment to an ethical attitude, failing to respect all applicable laws and regulations as well as Fifa’s regulatory framework to the extent applicable to him and demonstrating an abusive execution of his position as president of Fifa,’ Eckert determined.
Of Platini, Eckert said: ‘Mr Platini failed to act with complete credibility and integrity, showing unawareness of the importance of his duties and concomitant obligations and responsibilities. His actions did not show commitment to an ethical attitude’, and so he too was found to have demonstrated ‘an abusive execution of his position’ as a Fifa executive committee member and vice president.
Toppled with this much shocking finality from such summits of power and prestige, both presidents disputed the verdict, adamantly protesting, as they still do, that they had done nothing wrong. They appealed against the decision of the Fifa ethics committee to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which really tests the fairness of the procedures. Platini’s case was heard first, and he did not have much luck at CAS in Lausanne either. The judgement by a panel of three European professors, delivered on 9 May 2016, explicitly linked the payment of 2m CHF to the Fifa presidential election. Referring to Platini’s explanation that it was paid on an oral agreement made in 1998 that he could have 1m CHF a year, and that he had forgotten that he was only paid 300,000 CHF not 500,000 CHF, the CAS determination was not indulgent:
‘It was not until 1 February 2011–four months prior to the Fifa presidential elections and at a moment when Sepp Blatter and Mohamed bin Hammam were both still candidates to the election–that Fifa paid the amount of CHF 2m in favour of Mr Platini,’ the panel concluded.
‘Mr Platini justified such payment as back pay, explaining that he had orally agreed with Mr Blatter in 1998, when the future Fifa president was negotiating with him, to an annual salary of CHF 1m. The panel, however, was not convinced by the legitimacy of the 2m CHF payment, which was only recognised by Mr Platini and Mr Blatter, and which occurred more than eight years after the end of his work relations, and was not based on any document established at the time of the contractual relations and did not correlate with the alleged unpaid part of his salary (CHF 700,000 X 4 = CHF 2,800,000). Moreover, the Panel took note that Mr Platini benefited from the extension of a pension plan to which he was not entitled.’
The Fifa appeals committee had already reduced his ban to six years, and CAS did reduce it to four. Its panel stated that Platini was guilty of obtaining an undue advantage and a conflict of interest, but should not have been sanctioned for breaches of loyalty and the general rules of conduct as well. The panel also reduced his fine from 80,000 CHF to 60,000.
That was the end of the line for him. When the Swiss attorney general had announced the criminal investigation in September 2015, Platini, the lifelong leader, was a declared candidate for the Fifa presidency and just five months from the destiny of attaining it. Now he was banned altogether from any football activities, which had been his whole life and identity, except going to watch a match in the stands.
Blatter, too, was two months away from his planned, orderly handover of the ship to the next elected skipper when he was thrown overboard into the night. After he was suspended, he had told the Swiss newspaper Schweiz am Sonntag the same as he told Mark Pieth when he recruited him to advise on anti-corruption reforms: that he did not want to leave the House of Fifa by the back door:
‘I want a dignified departure after forty-one years,’ Blatter had said. ‘Otherwise, I would fear visiting my father’s grave. What do you believe will happen when I tell him that I give up? He’d step out of his grave.’
Within days of talking in such terms about his struggles and fear of disappointing his dead father, Blatter collapsed and was taken to hospital. He spent several days recuperating in Zurich, then went to rest back in the haven of his home in the Valais. His long-term PR adviser, Klaus Stoehlker, told the media that Blatter, under all the stress and pressure, had suffered ‘a small emotional breakdown’.
The decision from Eckert confirmed Blatter’s worst fear: he was banned, and he would not be leaving at the time of his choosing, by the front door. The day after the announcement, he held a press conference. He chose the old Fifa House, on Hitzigweg, where he had worked and made his way up so busily all those years. He looked a suddenly fallen, shrunken figure from the slick, controlled operator of four decades in Fifa. He was rough-shaven, dishevelled, looked dramatically aged, and he had a plaster on his cheek, having been found to have melanoma cancer and had some of it removed.
To the media, Blatter raged against the unfairness of it all, disbelief that the ethics committee had not believed his and Platini’s identical stories about their oral agreement. He said he was being used as a ‘punchbag’, and that it was still rooted in the USA’s failure to be given the hosting of the 2022 World Cup. He was asked if that was still valid, given that most members of the ethics committee which banned him were Europeans, and he suggested there were forces within Fifa who did not want Platini to be president. Facing this shock of the worst moment of his career, right at the end of it, and the pressure of global attention again, he was not always at his most coherent. In his hour of trouble, he referenced Nelson Mandela, ‘the great humanist’, who had said: ‘Humanity needs no other thing but human beings being respected.’ Blatter said he had been shown no respect because the media was given the news of his ban before he was himself. He declined to talk about his health, and promised at the end: ‘I am doing better; I’ll be back.’
But on 5 December 2016, CAS announced its decision to reject his appeal outright. Its panel had decided that the written contract invalidated any oral agreement the men claimed they had, and therefore the payment of 2m CHF was an ‘undue gift’. Blatter, seeing no way back, described that summation as ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘difficult to accept’, but this time managed a gracious kind of quote for the media:
‘I have experienced much in my forty-one years in Fifa,’ he said. ‘I mostly learned that you can win in sport, but you can also lose. Nevertheless I look back with gratitude to all the years, in which I was able to realise my ideals for football and serve Fifa.’
Platini, after his defeat, barely spoke in public again, although he was given a dispensation to say farewell at the Uefa congress. He watched as his former secretary general at Uefa, Gianni Infantino, seized the chance to leap into his shoes, and went for the presidency of Fifa himself, winning the vote in February 2016. Platini never accepted he had done anything unethical, and took his fall hard.
In the summer of 2016, Uefa’s European Championships were held in France, a month which had been gift-wrapped for Michel Platini. The former great player, World Cup and Euros captain of France, would have been there, in the best seat, as the Uefa or Fifa president, at a tournament he had overseen and expanded to twenty-four countries for the first time. Paris was given a makeover in devotion to football; a splendid fanzone was marked out around a wide, stately stretch of central Paris centred on the Eiffel Tower, which was resplendent in fresh gold paint, a giant ball at its base. His whole country was given over to football, but Platini did not go to a single game. He turned invitations down, and stayed private at his holiday home in Cassis, in the south of France, with family and friends, nursing his pride. In the tournament, after a hesitant start, the France team found its rapid, attacking confidence, spearheaded by the sharp Antoine Griezmann, blew away Iceland, who had beaten England, and made it to the final. Having a heart for the French hero who had done so much in his life for football, the national team, and the championships which should have been his stage, the organisers had Platini’s picture shown on the big screen of the Stade de France before the final. At the grand stadium in the heart of Paris, the home team waiting to take the field and sing the Marsellaise, the crowd full of Frenchmen looked up and saw that picture of Michel Platini, icon of France–and there was an audible chorus of boos.