As the most critical presidential election in FIFA’s history approaches on Friday, the ethics committee has settled the appeals from former President Sepp Blatter and former presidential hopeful Michel Platini. Their bans have not been entirely revoked, but they have been shortened from eight years to six, which means that they’ll end concurrently in 2022…right before the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Never change, FIFA.
Here is FIFA’s reasoning for the bans being snipped a bit:
Fifa Appeals Committee explains why they reduced Blatter & Platini's bans to 6 years pic.twitter.com/6DJBz3ZAm4
— Dan Roan (@danroan) February 24, 2016
Translation: we got a nice bag of cash in exchange, but not nearly big enough.
Both men were fined an undisclosed amount, and were suspended over a conflict of interest that emerged in a 2 million Swiss Franc payment that Blatter made to Platini while the former was FIFA President and the latter was UEFA President.
The bans are retroactive to when they were first suspended, so both men will be suspended from all football-related activities from December of 2015 until December of 2021. Blatter will be 85 when his suspension ends and Platini will be 61, assuming of course that more evidence against them doesn’t surface in the interim, or that they’re both not arrested by Swiss authorities or the FBI.
Last month, it was revealed that both Blatter and Platini were still being paid by FIFA and UEFA while their appeals were being heard. Blatter, in fact, will still be paid until the election of a new FIFA president on Friday.
[ESPNFC]
