Article on Platini from the Guardian. Suggestion is that his plans are being watered down but I think it’s a bit overly critical of the changes he is trying to introduce.
Platini’s plans already floundering
Michel Platini’s intention of boosting Europe’s smaller football nations are being resisted - by Europe’s smaller football nations.
Matt ScottMarch 15, 2007 01:59 AM
Michel Platini was elected as Uefa’s president with Europe’s lesser football nations as his constituency. There was the promise that England, Spain and Italy would forfeit their fourth Champions League place in favour of the likes of Denmark, the Czech Republic or Poland.
It was an election tactic that has served the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter - to whom Platini was a special adviser - very well indeed when he has curried favour with the likes of Trinidad & Tobago and Botswana. The pledge was high minded and well received, but only one month later, the Uefa president appears to have repositioned himself.
The reason? The very countries Platini sought to assist have resisted change. “Governments will not pay to support football any more, that is finished,” said the former European footballer of the year. “We have been told they need the big clubs because they produce big television revenues which brings solidarity to the rest of Europe.”
It is an implicit admission that the Champions League, Uefa’s own competition, has fattened the biggest clubs to such an extent that it is only through their devouring and regurgitating the income that the smaller nations can survive.
Rather than have them feed off those execrable scraps, Platini wants more clubs to be afforded the opportunity to play in the Champions League but knows that may be some way off. In the meantime he will seek a compromise option that will pit the lowest-ranked qualifiers from Europe’s top-six football nations against each other in a pre-qualifying preliminary play-off.
“The idea is to get a good balance,” he said. “I am not sure that the fourth club of England, Spain or Italy is better than the champion of a great football country like Denmark or the Czech Republic. They have won many cups in the past but today they can’t because the television money is not enough.”
How the game has changed since Platini was a player. Come this Saturday it will be exactly a year since this newspaper revealed G14’s policy document setting out plans for a breakaway league. That remains the elite clubs’ nuclear option but it does show how precarious president Platini’s tightrope is.
He talks about taking care not to be an “honorary figure” like his predecessor, Lennart Johansson, rather about being a “leader” for 21st-century European football.
Yet six months ago, in an attempt to guarantee its future survival, Johansson’s Uefa ceded all power to a strategic board made up of four representatives from the clubs (Barcelona, Ajax, Chelsea and Milan), four from the leagues (English, Spanish, French and Portuguese: ie, four of Europe’s big six) and four from the national federations (England and Spain, again, as well as Norway and Turkey). The clubs, leagues and federations will receive one vote each.
With the best intentions, Platini has tweaked this with the addition of another voting member from the international players’ union, Fifpro, but it is clear where the power lies. And it ain’t in Copenhagen or Prague.