Trial against Blatter and Platini: The sacrificial cult of the fallen football bosses

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Ex-Fifa boss Blatter gives interviews in front of the trial building in Bellinzona

Photo: ARND WIEGMANN / REUTERS

At the end of the story, they are reunited after all.

The two whose paths had repeatedly crossed over the decades, who conspired together and plotted against each other, who were once the closest allies and then became the worst enemies.

Now Joseph S., called Sepp, Blatter, 86, former head of the world soccer association Fifa, and Michel François Platini, 66, former world-class player, ex-boss of the European soccer association Uefa, are back together in a room after all these decades.

And not only that: They are sitting together in the dock before the Swiss Federal Criminal Court in picturesque Bellinzona in Ticino.

Accused of fraud, forgery, embezzlement and mismanagement.

In other words: accused of the Fifa system.

The two did not dignify each other in court on Thursday, hardly a look, both are said to have refused to stay in the same five-star hotel.

The old rope team has long since been cut up.

Deep fall after 2015

They only agree on the deep fall that both took after 2015.

After investigators investigated a payment of two million Swiss francs in Fifa money from Blatter to Platini in 2011.

An investigation that came about itself under strange circumstances.

But how can it be otherwise in a system where oddities are the norm?

Why is?

In 2011, Blatter had Platini transfer two million Swiss francs, an alleged consultant's fee.

At the time, the Frenchman was regarded as a close partisan of Blatter in Fifa. In 1998, Blatter was elected Fifa boss with Platini's support.

The Frenchman had helped him organize the European votes needed to beat then-Uefa boss Lennart Johansson, who was actually highly favoured.

It was a typical Blatter coup, you can also call it a putsch, that happened in the back room.

Platini was subsequently rewarded with the job of sporting director at Fifa, a post created especially for him.

"He said he was worth a million"

Platini was paid 300,000 francs a year for this, but that didn't seem to be enough for him, if Blatter is to be believed: "Platini said he was worth a million," the Swiss now claims in court.

Platini added in his statement: "I've never been in an authority like Fifa, I didn't know how it works." So when asked about his desired salary, he simply replied "one million".

How to do it like that.

Therefore, there was an additional payment of two million in 2011.

That's the exact payment they're both on trial for now.

The fact that Blatter gave the smart Frenchman the millions almost ten years after he gave up his job as sports director does not sound very credible.

In 2011, Platini had long been Uefa boss and was now sitting in Johansson's chair, a final humiliation for the Swede.

Instead, one can assume that the money could have been a thank you for Platini's active lobbying for Blatter's re-election as Fifa boss.

Also in the hope of being able to take over Blatter's legacy as world football boss at some point.

It was a classic Fifa deal, after all, nothing selflessly happened in the world association when they were both still in office.

In office and dignity you can say bad in her case.

Document miraculously surfaced

The fact that nothing came of it for Platini was due to the fact that in 2015 the entire Blatter network that had been built up over the years collapsed.

The raid on the Fifa Hotel in Zurich, the Fifa corruption in the wake of the World Cup being awarded to Russia and Qatar, the bribes that the members of the Fifa Executive Committee had collected over the years - all of this was now revealed, all of it became part of investigations.

The self-service store blew apart.

And in the midst of all the chaos of confiscated files, tens of thousands of files and documents, the proof of Blatter's payment of millions to Platini appeared very early on, almost miraculously.

Only a few months after the raid, the Swiss public prosecutor's office rushed to the public - fittingly, shortly before Platini could succeed Blatter.

As someone who had accepted two million francs from Blatter for an unexplained purpose, Platini was abruptly finished as a future Fifa boss.

Instead, in a similarly miraculous way, Platini's hitherto inconspicuous Uefa General Secretary Gianni Infantino rose to become the new Fifa boss.

It is likely that the Swiss investigators received a tip about the payment.

That this tip came from the inner circle of Fifa or Uefa, as well.

Nothing has been proven, as is so often the case with Fifa, but it is clear that there was one beneficiary of the whole affair: Gianni Infantino.

All this also brings the inglorious role of the Swiss investigators back into focus.

The former federal prosecutor Michael Lauber, who did not cover himself with fame during the investigation into the DFB summer fairy tale affair, already stumbled across his Fifa contacts, and the investigator at the time, Oliver Thormann, who was questioned as a witness on Thursday, is also because of his supposed proximity to Infantino in the twilight.

The fact that Thormann is now a judge at the Federal Criminal Court, albeit in a different chamber, is not without a certain piquancy.

Lawyer speaks of the "conspiracy"

In view of this overall picture, Platini's lawyer Dominic Nellen speaks of a "conspiracy," which has an unintentionally comical note, because few were as adept at plotting plots as Platini and Blatter.

"The aim of the story at the time was to eliminate Mr Platini as Fifa President," says Nellen, and it is clear that this will be the strategy of the Platini camp in the trial: to present the whole thing as an intrigue against him.

Which shouldn't necessarily be easy.

Infantino is not even called as a witness.

Instead, Fifa appears as a joint plaintiff because it wants to repeat the two million.

Blatter also follows a strategy, namely the one that has always been known from him.

He doesn't know anything, he thinks he's completely innocent, it's "completely incomprehensible" that he, as an old man, has to answer to the court.

The doctors attested to him in advance that he would be able to stand trial for a maximum of four hours per day.

At the start on Wednesday he had already broken off the interrogation, saying that he had breathing problems and chest pains.

However, that morning he had given numerous interviews, had never avoided television cameras on his way to court and had spoken of how "in a good mood" he was going to the trial, while Platini swept past the press people without much comment.

Blatter was always like this: he loved politics in the quiet little room, but at the same time he could never be without the spotlight.

On Thursday, however, he could be questioned: "I'm feeling much better," he told Judge Joséphine Contu Albrizio, before rejecting all allegations outright: the money to Platini was nothing more than "a late payment of wages." , there is such a thing »in every club«.

The payment was a "gentlemen's agreement" between the two.

He actually used the word gentlemen.

And anyway: The fact that he has to sit here before the Federal Criminal Court is only due to the previous conviction in public: "The media have given me a previous conviction." Even at 86, Joseph Blatter is still the same.