Duras, not known for her knockabout sense of humour, was then a highly respected woman of letters. It's not easy to place Platini's meeting in a British context, but it was rather as if Wayne Rooney had decided to confide in Jeanette Winterson. There is one exchange in which Duras invites the player to contemplate the thought processes of a racehorse.
Duras: "But do they [horses] experience the kind of passion that we have been talking about? Or is that a uniquely human thing? Platini: "Well, horses, yes, they can race. And of course they have the benefit of wearing blinkers. We cannot wear blinkers. If a football writer had talked to him like that, Platini observed, "I'd have left him hanging from the dressing-room wall.
And yet, once Duras broached the subject of Heysel, Platini appeared receptive in a way that might have eluded him in a more -orthodox interview. At some point, you have to put away your childish toys. That was the day," Platini said, "that I became a man. Eric Champel of France Football was with the player in the dressing room after the final.
It has become [in his mind] a kind of stain on the peak of his career. Champel is far from unsympathetic to Platini. There is something fundamentally very honest about him. You could sense that Platini was ill at ease, and that he felt he had made a major mistake. Champel, together with his France Football colleague Philippe Auclair, has done more than any other reporter to expose the curious -intricacies of Platini's conversion to the cause of Qatar , to the point that I imagine the Uefa president may have come to regard the pair as having entered into a job-share as his Moriarty.
What next, I asked Champel, for Platini? For years, given his loyal support for the current Fifa president, it was assumed that he would succeed Blatter. That development now seems far from certain.
I think all of this is troubling him greatly. I believe that Michel Platini is closely and sincerely bonded both to Uefa and to club football and that he has a genuine desire to democratise football. If there is one noun you wouldn't apply to him, I suggested, it might be diplomat. It's funny, I told Champel, that he's never bothered to learn decent English. You'd have thought, if you were regularly at receptions with a mixed group of people from Korea, East Africa, the USA and Japan, say, it could be Quite useful?
It's just ridiculous that Platini hasn't made the effort to speak -reasonably fluent English," Champel said. And then, of course, you get something like the interview he gave to Martin Samuel. You read that, and you think well, this guy is just not fit for office. Champel was not the first source to refer to Platini's seminal meeting with Samuel, who writes for GQ and the Daily Mail , and whose interview with Platini appeared in the latter publication in May Platini has since added to his PR team the talent of London-based former CNN anchor Pedro Pinto, whose professionalism is likely to ensure that such an article, which exposed Platini to -mercilessly effective scrutiny, will never be repeated.
Platini's encounter with Samuel is perhaps the most excruciating example there will ever be of the Uefa president's unfortunate reluctance to trouble himself with minutiae or, as others might put it, to do his homework. The British sports writer does not afford Platini the kindness of correcting his broken English. Samuel: "One of the people who you have got in charge of financial fair play is Jean-Luc Dehaene.
How can he be telling a football club, this is how you run your football club? Platini: "OK. It is not an answer. But he is at the beginning of the procedure and we will see at the end of his contract what we can do But he was prime minister of Belgium with big success. He was a director of Lotus Bakeries. Platini: "Perhaps because they know how to make debts they will be better at the -financial fair play. The Frenchman is characteristically frank about his decision to declare, in public, his vote for Russia and Qatar.
You can imagine, when you have 15 bids I say don't break me the balls. Is why always I want to announce my vote, then I am free and nobody comes to disturb me.
All your friends come. Let me in peace. Invited to contemplate the nightmarish prospect of a legal challenge from Australia and others, should the competition be kept in the Emirate, but moved to the winter, Platini remarked: "You have nothing to say to me.
I am not the boss of that. I think it is better to play in the winter. In summer, good luck in 60 degrees or if you can stay inside, I don't know. The feeling of most people I spoke to is that Platini is not likely to wind up as president of Fifa in , even if that institution's history has taught us that almost anything is possible. He's -intuitive in life, as he was on the pitch. That may be enough at Uefa. But it isn't enough at Fifa. There, you need other qualities. Such as? But did this mean that the French League, for example, had some moral authority over the Premier League?
Although my own opinion is that French football has become too technical, and that is why they are not too successful at the moment. They work hard at Clairefontaine [the most famous of France's nine elite training academies] but football is not just about work.
Also' - and suddenly we're back to the iniquities of the Premier League! Platini comes to life when we discuss French football culture. Not least of his achievements was to be part of a generation of French footballers who garnered the interest of French intellectuals, both for their elegant style of play and as part of the growing importance of mass culture in stuffy old highbrow France.
Arguably, the Zinedine Zidane generation, which won the World Cup, would never have happened without these three: certainly the French love affair with football, which was pretty much universal throughout the s, was born with this team. Platini is still very keen to present himself as a man of the people, an ordinary bloke, the voice of footballing common sense. But beneath this carefully constructed surface, there is a fierce and cunning intelligence.
This is a man unafraid to use the word 'hegemony' in public just imagine even Alan Hansen deploying this word correctly and with ease and his ruffled charm has even made him an icon of France's gay community. To make matters more confused, Duras - then the feminist icon of the French literary establishment - was a disciple of Georges Bataille, the notoriously convoluted philosopher of an erotic form of existentialism. Duras asked Platini questions such as: 'To be a footballer of genius is to be a martyr.
You play in a dream, beyond any law - is this angelic or demonic? And it got me known with intellectuals. And that's OK.
But I am a football man. And with this, we're back to the present day. Platini's big message is that he is here 'to protect football'. He has a tough job on his hands - as he acknowledges, his mission at Uefa is at least as big as any of the footballing challenges he has faced.
He is adamant that his presidency is not just an honorary position and that, just because he has been rebuffed by the big guns in the early stages, it does not mean the game is over. And that includes the English fans. Certainly, Platini does look like he is taking Uefa to some interesting places. He is a sly political operator, suited for the feints and counter-feints of the game's administration. Most significantly, he has a clear agenda for change, which he intends to implement across the board.
He argues that change must come from the bottom up and that the youth academies, which are in fact 'football factories where young players are force-fed a diet of over-training and financial cynicism', are killing the game: 'Football has a social role,' he insists, 'which is not just about taking young lads from third-world countries and making them into superstars. All of this will need to be regulated by Uefa. It is no less than a battle for the soul of soccer.
Platini is not anti-English. He speaks with authority and love of the English game. I, for one, would love to see him out of a job as quickly as possible and replaced with someone who has half a brain and is good for football. Enjoy our content? Join our newsletter to get the latest in sports news delivered straight to your inbox! Your sports. Join Newsletter. Platini, the current president of Uefa, has also claimed the prospect of a winter World Cup in Qatar is not an issue and something the organisation are looking at with Fifa.
In recent years, Platini has come in for criticism from most sections of the English media for various rulings that have been perceived as being anti-English, but he insists he is looking at the bigger picture. When we take a decision, of course there is a big media in England and so it gets a lot of attention, but this is about many clubs, from all over Europe.
We cannot say that you can spend more money than you bring in.
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