One blunt line on live television
Michel Platini did not hold back on Sunday night. A guest on Canal Football Club, the former UEFA president went straight at Gianni Infantino and called for the FIFA boss to step down.
His verdict fitted into a single sentence. “He failed, because he is the guardian of the rules of the game. He did not respect them, he must go,” the Frenchman said on air.
He went further on the man himself. Platini said he had always spotted a strong taste for “money and power” in his former colleague, long before the two of them fell out.
Try it for $0.99.
The backstory gives those words extra weight. Platini ran UEFA from 2007 to 2015, and Infantino served as the body’s secretary general underneath him for that whole stretch. The Italian-Swiss was then elected FIFA president in 2016, the year after the Frenchman was pushed out of the game.
Nothing is left of that working relationship. Platini has filed a complaint against the FIFA president for “trading in influence”, “criminal association with a view to making a false accusation” and “false accusation”. The courts now have the file.
His own record explains some of the bite. The former France No 10 was suspended by FIFA himself, fought the ban for years, and was finally cleared by Swiss justice in 2022. That is a decade of legal wrangling behind every word he said on Sunday.
“The bosses of football are Mbappe, Zidane, Maradona”
Beyond Infantino, Platini aimed at the whole set-up. The real figures in the sport, he argued, are not the ones sitting in offices in Zurich.
“It’s a little world of people who think they’re the bosses of football. Yet the bosses of football are Mbappe, Zidane, Maradona,” he said, before adding that players rather than administrators should be running the game.
The argument is not new. It resurfaces every time a governing body stumbles, and it has never once changed how anybody gets appointed. FIFA has said nothing publicly about his comments.
Discover the rest of the FOOTBALL news on our website and mathodds app!
in your pocket.
Real-time notifications & alerts
Leave a Reply