Platini stays on as president

Michel Platini has been re-elected as president of European football’s governing body Uefa.

The former France captain was unopposed at the Uefa Congress after proving popular among Europe’s 53 footballing nations.

The 55-year-old will serve a second mandate of four years, having first been elected in 2007 when he took over from the veteran Swede Lennart Johansson.

Platini set about implementing a far-reaching programme of reform that tackled corruption, racism and fan violence, as well as the thorny issues of financial irresponsibility and video technology.

Platini’s biggest initiative to date, the ‘financial fair play’ rules, mean that from the 2014-15 season onwards, teams who do not balance their books will face exclusion from the Champions League.

The Frenchman has now pledged to tackle violence and illegal betting in his next four years as Uefa president.

Platini highlighted sectarianism at Old Firm derbies as examples of violence he wants to eradicate from the game and praised the Scottish Football Association’s stand against sectarianism.

“As George Peat and Stewart Regan (president and chief executive of the SFA) so rightly put it in a recent statement on behalf of the Scottish association: there is no place in football for those who transform passion into violence and pride into sectarianism,” Platini told a Uefa congress in Paris.

Measures

“Every country should establish a whole battery of legal measures enabling them to ban hooligans from stadiums.

“Every country should appoint a prosecutor in charge of illegal betting and corruption in sport.

“I have started meeting the heads of state and government of countries particularly affected by this problem.

“It is important that their countries realise the seriousness of the situation and that they find a way to help us, you and their national associations.”

Platini also reiterated his belief in Uefa’s financial fair play rules protecting club football.

The rules mean clubs in European competition will only be able to spend on transfers and wages what they earn in revenues.

He added: “This project should enable us to prevent some of our most time-honoured clubs from going under because of risky management by an irresponsible few.

“In 1984 Jacques Georges (ex-Uefa president) used a phrase that I have been drumming home constantly for months and thought I had coined myself: ‘We all know what it means if we spend more than we earn, and in football it would mean the end of the game.’

“So… perhaps history does sort of repeat itself after all.

Finances

“On the topic of club finances, allow me to remind you of just one figure: together, Europe’s professional clubs accumulated net losses of 1.2 billion euros in 2009 alone.

“So yes, there is a huge amount of money in football, but more importantly there is a moral problem in the way this money is sometimes generated and used.

“Financial fair play is a crucial project that will enable us to clean up certain practices within our game.

“It will be implemented in full in the course of my next term and we will apply the rules with the courage and resolution for which Uefa should be known.”