"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 sport has moved on and his nine years as Uefa president feel a lifetime ago. He was the triple Ballon d'Or winner who leapt into the snakepit of football governance and emerged with his reputation sullied. Platini once compared himself with Icarus and, however one views the events that brought him down, there is little doubt he skirted the sun."
Michel Platini was banned from football over an alleged unlawful 1.35m payment linked to work as Sepp Blatter's technical adviser between 1999 and 2002, a transfer that surfaced in 2015 when Blatter stepped down. A criminal case followed but both men were acquitted definitively by a Swiss appeals court. Platini regards himself as cheated; the last decade was complicated for his family, and he insists he always felt innocent. Platini describes football as romantic to millions yet fundamentally big business. At 70, questions remain about whether he has more to offer at elite level.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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