Platini said he had fought as UEFA leader to preserve football from “all the excesses that its planetary success has engendered”.
Advertisement
He added that the “wind of change” was blowing through European football.
Even stranger, in the eyes of many, was the decision of Uefa to allow its deposed leader, Platini, who has been banned from football for four years, to make a farewell address to the congress as a “gesture of humanity”. Aleksander announced his candidacy for the UEFA leadership in June.
“We should show we are the ones who are the governing body with our 55 national associations, and at the same time we have to have dialogue with the clubs and I think the situation can be solved”.
The new UEFA president was elected for the term of two and a half years until the next regular congress of the European governing body of football. Platini, one of the best soccer players of his generation, when he had hopes of becoming Federation Internationale de Football Association leader, said people who hadn’t played the game should not be in charge of running it.
But in the world of football governance things are rarely straightforward.
After the vote, FA chairman Greg Clarke said he was happy to work with Ceferin, and welcomed his his clear mandate.
Ceferin becomes the seventh UEFA president. The Slovenian did say though that he would look again at the new structure of the European Championship, with matches spread across several countries leading to semi-finals and final in one place, which comes into place in 2020 and was the brainchild of Platini.
“This will be a thorny task”.
Clubs which qualify for the annual Champions League tournament in Europe gain millions of dollars in revenue through increased television coverage and ticket sales, on top of awards provided by UEFA itself. Once his popularity grew, larger soccer powers including Germany and France pledged their backing, making Ceferin a firm favorite before the vote in Athens.
“It’s a great honour, but also a great responsibility”.
The French three-time Ballon d’Or victor protested his innocence in an address to the congress ahead of the election and claimed that his “conscience is clear” over the payment. “It is what I promise to all of you today, nothing more nothing less”.
Advertisement
The duo were handed eight-year bans, later reduced to six years on appeal to Federation Internationale de Football Association, then to four years in a further appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The Swiss was has already faced a formal investigation over private flights he took before finally being cleared of wrongdoing, with FIFA’s ethics committee saying they were not improper.
