Quotes

Rise and fall of Michel Platini - the self-proclaimed 'football man' who forgot the meaning of integrity

Michel Platini might have been someone for great footballers to try to emulate when their playing days were over. Instead he is the cautionary tale. To be a ‘football man’ means nothing without integrity.
Uefa’s public support for Platini displays a breathtaking willingness to let the Fifa contagion spread from Sepp Blater’s failed state to Europe’s governing body, where cutting Monsieur President adrift would display a much clearer grasp of the crisis in world football.
The cult of the leader at Swiss HQs is such that Uefa sound almost as badly wounded as Platini himself, who called his eight-year ban a "pure masquerade" and now tries to position himself as a victim of Fifa vengeance. This will confuse those who thought Platini had Blatter’s corrupt parliament at his feet and was on a smooth trajectory to become the successor.
A certain latent glamour attaches itself to Platini, one of the great European playmakers, whose languid artistry has taken up permanent residence in the memories of older spectators. Nothing wrong with that. But talent was never a free pass to wield power self-servingly. There is no added pathos in Platini’s sentence for taking £1.35 million of Fifa money in 2011 – an uncontracted payment signed off by Blatter for advisory work Platini had stopped doing nine years earlier.
Such payments are part of a wider culture of power-deluded panjandrums using the world’s favourite game as a private bank
Paul Hayward
In fact, Platini’s offence feels worse because he framed himself as the football man, the soul of the game, who sought high office only to serve the sport he loved. Blatter, on the other hand, was a career bureaucrat who had shinned up Fifa’s greasy pole. Football merely served the megalomania of ‘Mr President’, as all at Fifa insisted on calling him.

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