Former UEFA boss Michel Platini has launched a scathing attack on FIFA president Gianni Infantino, accusing him of having "turned autocratic since the Covid-19 pandemic," in an interview published Thursday in The Guardian.

"He was a good number two, but not a good number one. He did a very good job at UEFA, but he has a problem: he likes the rich and powerful, those who have money. It's in his nature. He was like that as number two, but at the time, he wasn't the boss. Unfortunately, Infantino has turned autocratic since the pandemic," said the former French number 10 about the Italian-Swiss leader, who was his general secretary between 2009 and 2015 when he was at the head of the European body (2007-2015).

"There is less democracy than in the time of Blatter (FIFA president between 1998 and 2015). You can say what you want about Blatter, but his main problem was that he wanted to stay at FIFA for life. He was a good person for football," continued the three-time Ballon d'Or winner.

Platini has been in open conflict for several years with Gianni Infantino and his entourage, whom he suspects of having ousted him from the FIFA presidential race in 2015 by alerting the Swiss public prosecutor's office to a suspicious payment of 2 million Swiss francs (1.8 million euros). This payment was made by FIFA on the orders of its then-president Sepp Blatter to Michel Platini in 2011, without any written justification.

Accused of fraud, among other things, Messrs. Blatter and Platini were definitively acquitted in 2025 by the Swiss courts. Platini had also been suspended for eight years from all football-related activities by FIFA's Ethics Committee, a sanction reduced to six years on appeal and then to four years by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). At the end of November, Platini filed a defamation lawsuit against three former FIFA officials.

"I was destined to become FIFA president," he said. "All this happened because they didn't want it. This suspension was a grave injustice and, in the end, it was political. A group of people decided to kill me."

"These last ten years have been very complicated because of the suffering of my family: they see what is said in the newspapers, what people say about me, the international debate. But I never worried about the final verdict because I knew I was innocent, I knew that in the end, there would be nothing. I always felt at peace with myself," explained Platini, aged 70.

AFP