OPEN LETTER TO MICHEL PLATINI PRESIDENT OF UEFA
Mr. Michel Platini
President of UEFA
Route de Geneva 46
CH-1260 Nyon 2
Paris, June 21, 2012.
Dear Mr. Platini,
With your recent action RESPECT of UEFA, you tried to put in relief some
kind of standard of fair play in the football association that you lead,
involving many people and sport audience around Europe and worldwide. Your
action towards unity and respect across gender, race, religion and ability, is
actually a great initiative that can only inspire support, so congratulation!
But Mr. President, you always ask people to applaud and support your
initiative because you probably think that it is the right thing to do, to
follow the voice of a former important player, the President of the important
European football association and the vice president of FIFA too. Why not if
initiative is good, in his public sense and in sense of justice, fairness of
football plays!
Being involved in such a strong initiative and philosophically right
position on a planetary scale means that you, Mr. President, as well as your
organization should be irreproachable regarding your action that must be
perfectly clean, impartial and honest!
But are you - the UEFA and yourself as the President - acting
accordingly to such moral standards? Or should we understand that your
standards are good for some people and not for others?
In my opinion, your standards and your football Association are
unfortunately not clean and not good, but dangerously obstructive according to
the right sense of justice in sport!
I am going to give you some recent examples that perfectly illustrate
the fact that you and your organization are at the center of injustice,
incoherence, violence and unfairness. Your judgment and your justice have
double reading and double meaning.
Unfortunately, what we learnt from you is that your action is very
selective, often impartial regarding refereeing, and problematic with regard to
the public sense of justice, which you and your organization are manipulating
in a very strange manner. Double sense judgments towards small and big football
nation are often obvious if referring to your disciplinary actions, which are
sometimes very badly inspired, not always documented and ignoring the sources
violence problems and injustice in football sport. You forgot to be a good
example for others and especially for the young people.
Justice and fairness, Mr. President, are your Achilles’ tendon.
It is precisely the case when you refuse to apply the possibility to
check very clearly, according to these values, the referees judgments, which
are often the source of all problems and violence, and unfortunately not only
once, during the football competition and that generate conflicts during and
after the matches.
Modern technologies offer a perfect possibility to see the wrong action
on a football ground, and to check who is playing sportingly and who is unfair.
This would eliminate all possibilities of unfairness suspicion and avoid
unjustified results. But you and your organization refuse this solution, to
make your occult games and plays, persisting with unfairness and generating
false results, as a way to give advantage to your protected nations, your
favorite ones.
Rugby, which is a quite difficult sport, has accepted such technological
method and there is no violence like in football, because everybody can see the
video monitoring.
It was the case with the latest match Ukraine/England when all the
supporters around the world saw an Ukrainian goal. The ball was fully inside,
what all TV’s showed repetitively during the match and the days after. But your
referees chose ignoring the protest of Ukrainian players which have been
punished for nothing.
During the match Spain/Croatia, it was the same injustice when two
evident penalties weren’t pronounced in favor of Croatia. Players of Croatia
have been betrayed and Spanish ones protected. They have been punished with
elimination and you have imposed as “your personal gift” to the Croatian
federation a huge financial fine. These elements of course have changed the
sense of Euro 2012. Two nations of football have been eliminated in order to
save France, England, Italy, and Spain, which you and your Association are
protecting with Mafiosi method. This is not anymore sport, but an organized
mafia business, which you lead Mr. President. Where is your justice, which you
are often referring to when speaking but not when acting? While on the contrary
the voice of justice should be strongly heard by everybody.
To show your personal punch, you have opened a punitive action against
the Croatian federation because the disciplinary case also involves the
improper conduct of the team (six Croatian players received a yellow card
during the game), because they were protesting against injustice, and dangerous
attempt of the Spanish players, which should have been kicked out with red
cards. But Mr. Platini stayed silent! And he chose to punish the victims!
When the German referee incisively punished them for protesting against
his unfair refereeing during the whole match, which withdrawing Croatia out of
Euro 2012, you gave your personal touch using then a very vulgar langage -
according to what we read in the newspaper – and saying “kick Croatian shit out
”(Vecernji list, Zagreb, June 21st, 2012). Also for the setting-off and
throwing of fireworks, and the improper conduct of supporters, even if the
Poland police confirmed that it was not Croatian but Russian supporters, mixed
with Croatian supporters, who threw fireworks during the match Spain-Croatia,
and with video help you could have found him them after the match. But your
justice is speeder than facts, and everything was good to eliminate troubling
Croatian team from Euro 2012. By acting so, you prevented people from
discovering the sources of your improper hidden work. But it is perfectly clear
today for everybody that your attitude was unfair, improper and generated the
scandalous affaire of EURO 2012.
We did not hear Mr. Platini and the UEFA instance when Italian
officials, Italian participating players in EURO 2012, Italian sports daily
newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport and all media in Italie, accused Croatian and
Spanish players to prepare 2:2 fraud result arrangement. It is not fair for
players participating in Euro to affirm such things to media (Buffon, Pirlo….)
during the competition. There was not a single word from the UEFA and from its
President to condemn such an immoral activity or eventually infringe a fine to
the Italian federation, or to remove the accreditation of the journalis of
Gazzetta dello Sport for example. But it is probably difficult to do such a
thing for Mr. Platini as this same newspaper gave him some month ago the
Giacinto Facchetti International Prize for “his particular support of fair play
and backing of the elements that make football 'the beautiful game' “, or to
give fines to players of his former club, who played this strange activity,
because they know that it is a regular practice in Italian football, which has
nothing to do with “the beautiful game”.
Two days before European national-team football's blue-rib and
competition kicks off you said: "As always, football is irrational – and
that makes its beauty."
I will be much more happy if this irrationality has been better
observed, better treated in the sense of justice, with a better refereeing and
fluidity, to make it a really better winner, wherever they come from,
representing a big or a small nation, whatever their skin, religion and faith
are. Especially when we have technical capacity to see very precisely who plays
fair play and who is inspired by fraudulent manners, making dirty plays, which
could exhaust the public and give people a feeling of injustice and of perversion
of the game. It is this kind of refereeing that discourages sport lovers and
fans sometimes, transforming 'the beautiful game' into dangerous game.
If you had cancelled the matches England-Ukraine and Croatia-Spain, and
disqualified the referee for life arbiter for worst arbitrage, kicked out of
football, the public and the supporters would be thinking that there is a
justice, and as you affirmed on September 28th, 2011, at the Council of Europe:
“we will redouble our efforts to kick violence out of our stadiums, to
eliminate it”, or other one of your “bavardage” like : “This game must help
society to become better. It is crucial for the future of our children".
But your words are meaningless, out of sense and out of justice, your words are
of the wind, without consequences.
So if you are not able to assume your responsibility, Mr. Platini, the
best thing to do, and what I suggest you, as former football functionary and a
sport lover, is to resign because you don’t fulfill your duty, and obviously
you show and support impartiality in sport and such an attitude and such a
practice cannot be accepted.
This EURO 2012 is not anymore regular, so please I think that your
resignation will be the first good thing to do.
Ante GLIBOTA
Historian of Art and
Architecture
Titular Member of the
European Academy
of Sciences, Arts and
Humanities
76 Bis Rue de Rennes
75006 Paris – France
Tel. 00 33 1 43 35 19 55
Mobil phone:00 33 611
08 55 40
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