Platini Blunders in Embracing Nationalists' Political Football

It is an easy mistake to make. Just because someone was a brilliant football player he will therefore make a brilliant football administrator, right? Wrong, actually, and wrong on a grand scale like assuming Morrissey would make a first-class psychiatrist because he wrote some insightful songs about the human condition.

Michel Platini was the Morrissey of footballers. Sadly he has been the James Blunt of football administrators — not in the sense that he has been soppy and criminally middle-of-the-road but simply that he has been rubbish.

The Frenchman's transformation from the playing field to the president's office at Uefa has seen him exchange the magical for the hair-brained, the visionary for the expedient. No one could accuse him of indolence — barely a day passes without him floating some daft idea on the future of the game — but with every passing utterance it becomes more apparent that, wherever Platini stands on the issue of the day, common sense must inevitably be lined up on the other side.

His latest intervention, on the subject of the government's lobbying in support of proposals for a combined Great Britain and Northern Ireland team at the 2012 Olympics, confirms this suspicion. "Any time a government exerts pressure on national associations, that is viewed by Uefa as interference. Interference is unacceptable, which is why we fight attempts by governments to influence associations," he said. "This is a complicated problem but there has never been a Great Britain football team and I know from [Uefa general secretary and former Scottish Football Association employee] David Taylor the strength of the SFA's opposition."

The timing of Platini's intervention was significant, coming as it did on the launch day of a ludicrous campaign calling itself Save Scottish Football. From what, one has to ask: Hopeless referees? Incompetent administrators? The Old Firm's permanent and tedious hegemony?

Needless to say, the answer is none of the above. Instead we are being asked to believe the one thing Scottish football requires saving from is the prospect of a GB and NI team at the 2012 Games.

The former Scotland manager Craig Brown is the front man for Save Scottish Football but the "brains" of the outfit is a Scottish Nationalist Party politician called Christine Grahame, who appears to believe that giving women footballers from Scotland the chance to play on the world's biggest stage for a gold medal is a bad idea.

"The threat posed by the creation of a GB football team goes way beyond football. No one, bar a handful of politically motivated zealots in London, wants a GB football team — precisely because they recognize the huge threat this poses," Grahame says.

The "huge threat" referred to by Grahame and others of her ilk is the notion that Fifa would use the creation of a combined team in 2012 to force through the abolition of the four home national associations and, with that, the four home national teams. This brings us back to the "political interference" Platini found so objectionable.

For the last few months the government minister Jim Murphy has lobbied Fifa and received written assurances from the game's governing body that it would not seek to merge the home nations after 2012. He conveyed these assurances to the Scottish FA, as well as other opponents of the idea, and much good it did him and his cause.

"Despite Fifa's assurances this would not be binding for the future. Changes would be made at Fifa. There would be a new president and new committee — and they could make changes," said Brown.

No doubt Brown's objections are genuine but they fail to take into account the fact that, if Fifa is duplicitous enough to ignore its own written promises, and determined enough to abolish the four home associations, then it will simply go ahead and do it, whether a GB and NI team plays in London 2012 or not.

All of us are capable of denying the obvious, especially when we have another agenda. In this instance Ms Grahame has another agenda, which is to use Scottish football to further the political cause of Scottish nationalism. In this she is joined by her political boss, Alex Salmond, who had this to say on the subject of a combined team: "To jeopardize the entire future of Scottish international football on the basis of an undertaking from one official, at one point in time, I think is daft. And all for participation in an under-23 tournament of a few players."

Salmond, for those whose knowledge of affairs north of the border is deficient, is Scotland's first minister, which by any sensible interpretation renders his intervention "political interference". Presumably we can expect President Platini to condemn such behavior before the day's end, unless of course, he is too busy concocting his next daft idea for changing the face of football.