PARIS: Michel Platini, banned former UEFA president, has attacked “the junk judges of FIFA and CAS” who “are not real judges” and believes that he will end up being vindicated in his fight to clear his name.

Platini, also a former FIFA vice-president, was suspended for eight years at the end of 2015 by the ethics committee for accepting a “disloyal” a payment of €1.8m from the world federation on the authorisation of then president Sepp Blatter.

His suspension was reduced on appeal to ?? years but the overall verdict was approved by the Court of Arbitration for Sport and the Swiss Federal Court.

In an interview with Marianne, Platini said he will now take his appeal to European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg.

He said: “I can not accept losing when I did nothing, I was prevented from working for four years in football Who are these clowns that prevent me from working? The junk judges of FIFA and CAS are not real judges.”

Blatter is under criminal investigation in Switzerland concerning the payment while Platini is a formal witness according to prosecutors.

The former captain then manager of France also said he had appealed to the ECHR to defend himself “against all these crooks of Zurich and FIFA . . . It was only a plot for me not to be president. The case is just beginning and I will be proved right.”

On other topics Platini defended the award of the 2018 World Cup to Russia and said he had voted in favour because he was “thinking about the 150m Russians who are happy to welcome such events – should we deprive Russian kids of the World Cup because of the power-game policies of the west? I do not see a reason.”

He also added: “If I would be asked to return to football then I would want to become head of a television channel because then I would have more power than the UEFA president: it’s television which decide the day of the match, the time of the match and now they will even referee the match [with VAR].”

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