When Platini spoke to me in Manchester last week, he was at pains to stress there was nothing anti-English in the long campaign he envisaged against debt, an enemy of footballing fairness once described by the former Uefa chief executive Lars-Christer Olsson as "economic doping".
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More and more, debt can be seen as one of football's worst influences. It creeps up while our eyes are closed, as I was reminded a few years ago after Dundee, the club dearest to my heart, reached the Scottish League Cup final. We had players such as Claudio Caniggia, the Argentine World Cup finalist, whose wages an average home attendance of about 4,000 clearly could not pay. Later the club nearly folded and, though relegation ensued, it was far less shameful than the realisation that our trip to Hampden Park had been fraudulent in the sense that Dundee had got there by overcoming rivals whose books were balanced. The reflection that Rangers, who beat us, were even deeper in debt seemed irrelevant. That season no longer lives in the memory because, in effect, we cheated.
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The problem occurs when the clubs who run up huge debts always win - and that we must stop. Some clubs, and some leagues, have asked us to. We are preparing a plan that will encourage clubs to reduce their debts and give us clear, clean competition.
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If the strategy council resolves to eradicate debt, Uefa's executive committee will endorse it and only clubs with balanced books will be licensed to play in the European competitions
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