Platini and Blatter Cleared in Corruption Case. 

Today, Michel Platini and Sepp Blatter, two heavyweights of the global football administration, were cleared of corruption charges. According to a report in The Guardian, the Swiss attorney general’s office had asked for 20 months in prison with two years of the sentence suspended.  This case centered around a payment of $2.2 million to Blatter from Platini in the name of non-contracted work done when Platini was advising Blatter’s campaign to be re-elected as FIFA president from 1998 to 2002. According to a report in the BBC, this case was tied in with the wider FIFA scandal and other high-ranking FIFA officials participating in corruption and bribery on an industrial scale. While this is no surprise to me, it is a sad indictment of the state of football that this type of corruption is accepted so readily and that supporters face ever-increasing prices. At the same time, the administrators who run the game continue to rich off the people who love the beautiful game so much.