Blatter and Platini are Both Banned for Eight Years

Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini have been sensationally suspended from all activity in football for the next eight years.

Inevitably, the 79-year-old Swiss administrator and 60-year-old Frenchman will not accept the verdicts and sentences delivered today by German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, chairman of the adjudicatory chamber of the ethics committee of world federation FIFA.

They will go first to the FIFA appeal committee and then to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Ideally Blatter wants to clear his name in time to preside over the extraordinary elective congress which will pick his successor in Zurich on February 26; Platini wants to be back in that election race.