Athens: Uefa's disgraced former president Michel Platini will be allowed to address its Congress on Wednesday as a "gesture of humanity" despite his ban from the sport, Fifa's ethics committee said on Monday.
The Frenchman has been banned for four years from all soccer-related activity for ethics violations and his replacement to head the sport's European governing body will be elected at the event in Athens.
The ethics committee of soccer's governing body said an exception had been made for Wednesday's event following a request from Uefa.
"Uefa formally asked the adjudicatory chamber of the independent ethics committee for an exception for Mr Platini to be able to make a short farewell address to its congress in Athens," said the committee in a statement.
"The chairman of the adjudicatory chamber, Mr. Hans-Joachim Eckert, granted this exception as a gesture of humanity."
One of the finest players of his generation who went on to become a powerful sporting official, Platini was suspended over his dealings with fallen world soccer chief Sepp Blatter during the scandal which shook the sport's global governing body last year.
Platini was banished along with former Fifa president Sepp Blatter over a payment of two million Swiss francs ($2.08 million) made to the Frenchman by Fifa with Blatter's approval in 2011 for work done a decade earlier.
Fifa's ethics committee said the payment, made at a time when Blatter was seeking re-election, lacked transparency and presented conflicts of interest. Both men denied wrongdoing.
Platini, who was first elected as Uefa president in 2007, had been favourite to replace Blatter at the time. Instead, his former general secretary at Uefa, Gianni Infantino was voted to the top job in February.
Uefa elects a new president on Wednesday whose main task will be to stop what European officials say is an inexorable slide towards a breakaway soccer Super League open only to wealthy clubs such as Real Madrid and Manchester City.
Aleksander Ceferin, a lawyer from Slovenia, and Dutchman Michael van Praag, an experienced football administrator, are the only candidates for a job which will essentially involve keeping European football intact in its current form.
Platini had resigned in May after exhausting the appeal process and the power vacuum allowed the big clubs to negotiate changes to the flagship Champions League in their favour. Those were finalised last month when Uefa opened up more places to teams from Europe's biggest four leagues - effectively Spain, England, Germany and Italy - in the competition's lucrative group stage and cut those allocated to the rest.
Faced with the possibility of the big clubs forming their own Super League, Uefa said it had managed to "keep it in the family" but the move infuriated many clubs and leagues from outside the main countries.
Both candidates criticised the way in which the Champions League changes were made. However, as so often happens in the secretive world of soccer politics where officials like to keep their options close to their chests, they were cagey on whether they would try to reverse the changes if elected.
"There needs to be a far stronger balance between sporting merit and commercial pressures, otherwise we risk an inexorable slide towards an NFL-style closed-shop system," said Neil Doncaster, CEO of the Scottish league.
"Uefa has a duty to act on behalf of the entire game, not just a few, select clubs and leagues and it must take that duty far more seriously if it is not to risk presiding over a harmful fragmentation of the game."
