Lausanne: Uefa’s fallen president Michel Platini mounted a final challenge against his six-year ban from football on Friday in an appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), with a verdict due by May 9.
The stakes could not be higher for the 60-year-old former French international, who led Europe’s powerful football confederation and was favoured to take charge of world governing body FIFA before his dramatic downfall last year.
Among the witnesses at the day-long hearing was Platini’s former ally-turned-foe, FIFA’s disgraced ex-president Sepp Blatter.
If CAS overturns the ethics violation verdict imposed by FIFA judges, then Platini could be at the Stade de France for the Euro 2016 opener between hosts France and Romania on June 10.
A negative verdict will see his glittering career in the sport brought to an ignominious halt.
“Today the match begins, a new match, the final...I’m optimistic, we’re going to win,” Platini told reporters before entering the court in the Swiss city of Lausanne.
Exiting the court after the hearing, Platini said his confidence had grown and restated his claim that the verdict from FIFA judges was unjust.
The Frenchman has been sanctioned over an infamous two million Swiss franc ($2 million, 1.8 million euro) payment he received in 2011 from then-FIFA president Blatter.
FIFA’s ethics committee in December banned both men from all football activities for eight years. The suspensions were cut to six years in February.
Both men insist they did nothing wrong and that the payment was part of a legitimate oral contract tied to consulting work that Platini did for FIFA between 1999 and 2002.
CAS secretary general Matthieu Reeb said that May 9 verdict would include “simply a decision and the reasoning will come a little later”.
Before entering the court, Blatter told reporters he was “happy” to honour a request from FIFA that he testify and that he was looking forward to greeting Platini again.
“It has been a while since I’ve seen him,” the 80-year-old Blatter said. He later described the process as “fair (and) very proper”.
“I hope that my participation has helped to find a solution to this problem,” Blatter said, declining to discuss specifics of his testimony.
