Winsome, debonair and rhetorically fluent Michel Platini never won the World Cup as a player, but no one ever doubted his quality, which spoke eloquently for itself, or stature, which was very, very high.
He was easily among the best of his time globally; France would always remember him as one of their best-ever. And when, eased by Sepp Blatter, FIFA chief, into football administration’s plush and privileged interiors, amid hints that he was being expected to be looked upon by the world as the heir apparent in the game’s great, worldwide empire, Platini seemed poised for the sort of triumph that would in due season come to be described as unparalleled.
It helped that he, as UEFA’s boss, also came up with ideas — financial fair play, for instance, springing from his well-chronicled belief that football was spending money it didn’t have, thereby racing blindly towards doom – but Blatter’s voluntary exit could never really be taken for granted.
He’s a man who’s survived exposures galore and relishes the power he holds much in the same way as his predecessor, Joao Havelange, the Brazilian who, as acknowledged by FIFA, took bribes and whose association with the International Olympic Committee ultimately ended in sordid circumstances that scarcely brightened his image. Most importantly, Blatter’s pay, till date, is a FIFA secret.
You don’t walk peaceably out of a job like that. But Platini, having waited long enough, presumably going at least by his own time-keeping standards, and detecting no signs of Blatter’s hurried passage into history’s departure lounge despite being duly informed, periodically, of the Frenchman’s ambitions, which is good fodder for the media, has now dropped a bombshell the world, judging by its instant reaction, doesn’t know how to run away from. It’s a crackerjack, if the warp and weft of sport politics is something you’re alive to.
UEFA, the European governing body for football, has let it be known “it is keeping an open mind about inviting teams from outside Europe to compete at Euro 2020. The proposal, which could involve nations such as Brazil or Argentina taking guest roles in the competition, is one that has been discussed … as a means of, as it says, promoting the international game.”
“The Independent”, the London newspaper, reported this week that “it would be a huge departure from the format of the competition which was begun in 1960 and whose finals will be expanded to 24 teams when it is next held in France in 2016.”
It might leave you wondering how UEFA can get up to this – calling over non-European teams – but there’s already a precedent: they’ve been doing it in South America in their continental championship. And, frankly speaking, it isn’t about the European Championship at all. Read between the lines, and what is being sought to be achieved is a clear, unmistakable scuttling of the quadrennial showpiece called the World Cup.
The facts are simple: it’s Europe which bankrolls the game; Europe is where the world’s front-rank players are; if Europe opens its nation-based event to the world, everyone will go running there, Usain Bolt shamed into receding from the competitive scene. And if they really want to pull it off, follow-through and all, as PG Wodehouse might have said, what can FIFA do about it, especially because there’s the possibility that Europe will prefer Platini’s show to Blatter’s? What if a World Cup summit showdown pits Ecuador against the Maldives, or Ghana against Papua New Guinea? Isn’t it a pretty pickle? But Europe has said nothing to persuade you it will do it. Blatter, rolling in the mulligatawny as of now because of the goshawful row over Qatar hosting 2022 World Cup matches in the heat of the desert and the deaths of so many Nepalese as infrastructure is created for the show, is likely to pin the blame for the tournament being awarded to the West Asian country on Platini, who – wonders never cease — voted for the Gulf state when it came to the crunch.
He’s in good company, given that Pele, too, has endorsed football matches in 50 degree C, which is what FIFA wants. The Qatar World Cup, and its assorted spin-offs, are, of course, a huge scandal, but that, it seems, is how the ball rolls.
Platini is the greatest potential threat to a fifth term for Blatter as FIFA president at the next FIFA election set for 2015 but what about the game?
