Michel Platini, the former president of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), has personally congratulated current president Aleksander Ceferin after the European body threatened to boycott the World Cup. The move comes amid an escalating dispute with FIFA and its president Gianni Infantino over his new commercial projects.
The exclusive comes from French newspaper L'Équipe. Platini, who ran UEFA between 2007 and 2015, phoned Ceferin, the Slovenian head of the European body, to congratulate him personally on the stance taken unanimously by the organisation and its 55 members: the threat to boycott the World Cup in protest at Infantino's controversial commercial projects.
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Despite the countless media requests he receives, Platini keeps his feelings to himself in public. Behind the scenes, though, he is following the crisis shaking FIFA closely. At the heart of it sits the plan to set up a commercial company called "FIFA Forward Enterprise", open to private-sector investors, in a structure that could allow shares linked to the World Cup to be "sold" to them.
Remember, too, that Platini is locked in open war with the FIFA president, once his right-hand man during his time atop UEFA. The former France star blames Infantino for blocking his path to the FIFA presidency in 2015, in the wake of the "FIFA Gate" scandal.
UEFA laid it out in a statement on Thursday. No European team would feature in any FIFA competition as long as the proposal stands, and unless FIFA guarantees it "will never open its governance or its competitions to private interests".