Michel Platini: 'It hurts,' soccer star says of police questioning

PARIS — After a day of police questioning centering on his former role as a top decision-maker in soccer, Michel Platini was released from custody without charge in the early hours Wednesday and said he found the experience painful given “everything I’ve done” in the sport.

Summoned Tuesday morning to testify in a French corruption investigation of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the former head of European soccer governing body UEFA said he had been expecting to be questioned only as witness, as he had done 18 months previously.

“I arrived and was immediately taken into custody. It hurts. It hurts for everything I can think of, everything I’ve done. It hurts, it hurts. But after all, they did their job and then we tried to answer all the questions,” he said.

The former star midfielder for France and Juventus said investigators quizzed him about an array of tournaments, including the 2016 European Championship, the World Cups in Russia in 2018 and in Qatar in 2022, that he had a hand in deciding where they would be played, when he presided at UEFA and served as a vice-president at world soccer governing body FIFA. The investigators also asked about French club Paris Saint-Germain, bought by Qatar in 2011.

“It was long, but given the number of questions, it could not be different,” Platini said, adding he felt “at peace.”

“I feel totally foreign to any of these matters. This is an old affair. You know it, we explained it. I have always expressed myself with full transparency in all the newspapers. That’s it. It goes on, they investigate, they search.”

Also detained Tuesday for questioning and later released was Sophie Dion, a sports adviser in former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s administration. Claude Gueant, the former secretary general of the Elysee presidential palace under Sarkozy, was questioned as a free witness and not detained.

Their involvement added a layer of political intrigue to the investigation of the hugely controversial decision to hold soccer’s showcase tournament in Qatar, a desert country so scorchingly hot in June and July that matches will be played instead in November and December.

The closed-door, secret-ballot FIFA vote in 2010 that picked Qatar baffled many at the time, not least because the Persian Gulf nation has no soccer pedigree to speak of. But the gas-rich nation is pouring billions into the world’s most popular sport and has the means to finance new stadiums.