Federation Internationale de Football Association slams Blatter with 8 year ban

In response to the eight-year ban from the FIFA independent Ethic committee, suspended FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter on Monday said “I will fight!”

Despite the ban, both Blatter and Platini will be allowed to attend matches – including Euro 2016 in France – if they buy tickets in a private capacity.

Roughly an hour after the verdict was announced, Blatter held a news conference in which he pledged to appeal his case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, meaning the saga isn’t quite over yet.

Regarding Blatter’s prospective CAS challenge, a spokesman for Fifa’s ethics prosecutors, Andreas Bantel, said he first needed to read the motivation of such an appeal before commenting. “His assertion of an oral agreement was determined as not convincing and was rejected by the chamber”.

Blatter and Platini were serving a 90-day provisional ban handed by the FIFA’s ethics committee over claims that the latter had received a “disloyal payment” of 1.35 million pounds from the outgoing president in 2011. Blatter has said he paid Platini for consulting services he performed between 1999 and 2002.

Blatter paid two million Swiss Francs to Platini when he was seeking re-election as Federation Internationale de Football Association president.

“The decision is no surprise to me”, he said in a statement. Michel Platini, president of UEFA, also got an eight-year ban.

As FIFA bans Blatter and Plantini, it ends Blatter’s career of 17 years leading world soccer in a disgraceful manner.

He also said he “was sorry for FIFA”, which has been engulfed in an unprecedented corruption scandal, including waves of criminal indictments targeting top officials by the United States justice department.

Both Blatter and Platini will also have to pay large fines of $40,000 and $80,00, respectively.

Platini’s criticism of FIFA’s ethics watchdog has escalated throughout the inquiry and his condemnation continued on Monday.

“I’m convinced that my fate was decided before the December 18 hearing and that this decision is just a pathetic manoeuvre to hide a true will of taking me out of the football world”, Platini said in a statement.

The sentence against the two most powerful men in football stunningly highlighted the troubles faced by the world’s most popular sport, in which billions of dollars have been invested in recent years.