Blatter's Pet Platini Is The New UEFA President

Well, I suppose change is never really a bad thing, but let's see what happens. Lennart Johansson has been a stalwart of European football for years, often managing to stave off Sepp Blatter and his ridiculous ideas. They were always big rivals, Blatter and Johannsen, but who was always the one with alelgations of corruption, bribery and controversy over his head? The answer is Blatter. Still, old Lennart held his UEFA place, and Blatter kept on hanging on to that FIFA presidency (chances are he will again).

Platini is by all means an interesting candidate. A legendary footballer, and an intelligent if (often unnecessarily) outspoken candidate, who at 51 is a pup in a world of heavyweight dinosaurs; Blatter is 71, Johansson is 78, Nicolás Léoz (the CONMEBOL president) is 79, and so on and so forth. The Frenchman should by all means offer a great many things to the European footballing community, despite his slightly radical stance.

But the worry behind all of this, is that Platini is Sepp Blatter's little puppy. Whether he will ultimately carry out his own agendas or those of Blatter remains to be seen. One thing is for sure, Blatter has for years tried to interfere in European football, but had very little success because that has always been Johansson's domain (and I think I speak for most people when I say I am glad of this). Now things might be different - Blatter has a means to push his ideas and schemes into the most powerful body in club football. I hope that Platini has the strength and vision to really want to make change happen, but he has come riding in on Blatter's horse, and one wonders whether he can carry himself without the the support of the ageing Swiss megalomaniac.

Platini's first priority seems to be to reformulate the Champions League, where he wants to limit the participation of the top leagues to 3 clubs each - whether this means more participation for smaller leagues or a smaller competition, remains unclear. It's a Catch-22 situation really; Johansson reformulated the European Cup to the Champions League and it became a watershed in modern club football. He concentrated the best clubs in Europe (some might say the world), into an intriguing contest which offered up varied matches and tons of money to everyone involved. The Champions League is a hallmark competition, and although UEFA has not done too well with the UEFA Cup, Lennart Johansson must be given credit.

However one complaint was always that the Champions League catered to the big clubs and leagues, with seeding and coefficients and the format etc. So one can see how Platini's stance is positive (and he has received a lot of backing from many of the smaller football bodies), but at the same time the whole draw of watching the Champions League was that it was the pinnacle of club football. Unbelievably good games and matchups of the biggest names in football. Occassionally a smaller or surprise name was thrown up and did quite well (in recent years Porto, Monaco, Leverkusen, Leeds, Dortmund), and the tournament was ultimately meritocratic, if slightly harder for teams having to qualify. Platini's involvement threatens to dilute the quality of the competition, and upset a lot of existing balances. The good thing is that the G-14 have new representation in David Dein, and he has shown a lot of positivity towarsd working with Platini. Hopefully things work out well.

For the record, the voting was apparently very tense stuff, and there was a lot of bad blood invovled. Yesterday, in the first round of voting, Platini came out on top 26-25, then Johansson usurped him 26-25, and finally today Platini won 27-23. (OK, my numbers might be incorrect, but this was loosely how it went). You never know though, with Blatter involved, if sketchy, underhanded things are going on or not.