Uefa to ratify prize money today for Euro 2016 finalists

Uefa president Michel Platini will discover this morning whether he can play an active part in the weekend's event in Paris where the executive committee later today is due to ratify the prize money for next summer's Euro 2016 finals.

The draw for the group stages will take place tomorrow evening.

Platini has been unable to carry out any of his duties since being suspended from all football activities for 90 days on October 8th after being accused of receiving an improper payment from Fifa president Sepp Blatter in 2011.

He will hear at 9am (Irish time) whether the Court of Arbitration for Sport has upheld his appeal against the sanction and agreed to lift the ban.

If it has, then the Frenchman is likely to be back centre stage over the next two days.

When he declared his candidacy to succeed Blatter back in July, this would have been seen as a major opportunity to project his status as the most important man in European football.

Like any politician, Platini will also want to be closely associated with the announcement of the tournament prize money.

An increase of at least 50 per cent over the roughly €200 million distributed to the 16 finalists in 2012 will be confirmed although it is not clear precisely how much more will be on the table this time around.

Basic figure

Every participating association was guaranteed at least €8 million (the sum the FAI received) last time with additional payments accruing depending how far teams then progressed in the tournament.

Spain eventually received around three times the basic figure.

Uefa have guaranteed the 50 per cent increase this time but indicated that anything on top of that would depend on the final projections for revenues once all of the major commercial contracts had been signed.

With eight extra teams, the basic figure would only ensure that the prize money this time is roughly in line with 2012 and while there has been some speculation that associations might each be guaranteed €12 million this time, the FAI, it seems, is expecting the money per team to be largely unchanged from what was paid out in Poland.

Platini, meanwhile, could be back at CAS before long with Fifa’s ethics committee due to hold the hearing into the case against him next Friday after which it will decide whether to hand him a lengthy, perhaps lifelong, ban.

The charge relates to a €1.83 million payment made to the Frenchman by Fifa in 2011, just a matter of months before Blatter ran for re-election and the Uefa president decided against standing himself.

Platini insists the money was due to him under the terms of a verbal agreement made with Blatter in 1998 to act as an adviser to the Fifa president.

There were media reports in France last week suggesting that some documentation supporting his version of events may exist.

Even his own account of things does not reflect especially well on the Frenchman, however, with Platini claiming that when Blatter asked how much he wanted to be paid, he said “a million” and when Blatter asked “a million of what?” he essentially said it did not matter as he was “not a money man”.

Blatter settled on Swiss Francs, he says, but then found that he could not then pay the million per annum as it was politically difficult for him to do so when the organisation’s then general secretary only earned €300,000. The pair then came to an arrangement, Platini claims, for him to also get the lower amount with the balance at some unspecified later date.

It is believed by some that the real reason for the deferred payment was that Platini, having moved to Switzerland. would benefit in time from tax breaks afforded to those who had lived there for a specified period.

But even if the arrangement wasn’t motivated by tax avoidance, his characterisation of it as “a thing between two men,” will not impress those critics who feel that there has been a little too much of that sort of thing around Fifa.

With the ethics committee due to make its decision on the case and any related sanctions public before Christmas, a favourable CAS ruling now would create an interesting situation in relation to Gianni Infantino, Uefa's general secretary.

He said when announcing his candidacy for the top job at Fifa that he would step aside in the event that Platini was cleared to run but Infantino has become one of the frontrunners in his own right during the intervening weeks.

He is not weighed down by the sort of baggage that afflicts his 60-year-old boss at this stage with issues like Platini’s support for Qatar’s World Cup bid, his acceptance of a €20,000 watch in Brazil and, of course, his general silence during more than a decade on Fifa’s executive committee about the rampant corruption around him likely to cost him the votes of some previously supportive associations in the event that he does t get to run.