Michel Platini Wins 2nd 4-Year Team As UEFA President

Former France midfielder and four-year UEFA president Michel Platini will be holding onto his position, having won re-election to another term as the head of European football’s governing body. Then again, it’s not particularly hard to win an election when nobody else decides to run against you (presumably Grant Wahl thinks such a role would be beneath him). The result secures Platini’s spot until at least 2015, giving him plenty of time to enact all of those reforms for Financial Fair Play, reducing child trafficking, and making sure the best teams don’t all get to play in the Champions League in favour of teams from Cyprus and Slovakia for some reason.

Platini thus far has a mixed body of work, but I don’t think you can question that his heart is in the right place. He wants football and football competitions to be less unfair, he wants clubs not to exploit youth players to quite the extent they do, and he wants more diversity in Europe’s international competitions (but less in domestic leagues for some reason). None of those ideas are being implemented particularly well and UEFA still has problems with transparency and refereeing at the highest level, but they’re doing their best to try to make football better, so while not many are huge Platini fans, getting another four years of the man isn’t too big of a deal.