Michel Platini

Michel Platini filed a criminal complaint in Paris on 8 June 2026 against FIFA president Gianni Infantino and five others, including former Swiss attorney-general Michael Lauber and former FIFA legal director Marco Villiger. The charges are conspiracy to make a false accusation and influence-peddling; Platini alleges the scheme was designed to prevent him from standing for the FIFA presidency in 2015. He simultaneously filed a parallel civil damages suit against FIFA. The complaint arrived days before Infantino presided over the opening of the largest World Cup ever staged.

Platini is one of the greatest footballers in French history. He won the Ballon d'Or three consecutive times (1983, 1984, 1985) and led France to their only European Championship title in 1984, scoring nine goals in the tournament. He captained Juventus to Serie A and European Cup success in the same era. After retiring he moved into administration, serving as UEFA president from 2007 to 2016, during which he expanded the Champions League format and oversaw the creation of the Europa League. His presidency ended when he was suspended by FIFA's Ethics Committee over a CHF 2 million payment from FIFA, which he described as a verbal agreement with former FIFA president Sepp Blatter. He was twice acquitted in Swiss criminal courts, most recently in 2022, and had his four-year FIFA ban reduced and then overturned.

The Paris filing re-opens one of football governance's most consequential personal vendettas and lands at a moment when FIFA's ethical standing is already contested on a separate front: the FairSquare complaint against Infantino that the Norwegian federation backed was referred to the IOC's Ethics Commission on 8 July 2026, which rejected it on 24 July on jurisdiction grounds rather than on its merits, returning that file to FIFA's own ethics committee . Platini's own complaint and civil suit remain a separate proceeding before French prosecutors, whose decision on whether to advance the case will determine whether his legal campaign outlasts the tournament that provoked it.