Over several years, Qatar injected 1.8 billion euros into French football club Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) in a massive breach of the Financial Fair Play regulations of European association football’s governing body UEFA. Mediapart reveals here the background to the affair and how the then president of UEFA, Michel Platini, and his secretary general, Gianni Infantino, who is now president of FIFA, helped cover up the fraud, allowing the club to escape exclusion from the prestigious and lucrative Champions League.
While money is not everything in football, it certainly plays a major role in the professional game. Over a period of just a few years, PSG has distanced all potential rivals in France’s top-flight Ligue 1 division and carved a place for itself among the biggest teams in Europe. But, according to documents obtained by German news magazine Der Spiegel, gathered under the project Football Leaks, (see more on the source here) and studied by Mediapart and its partners in the media network European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) behind the sporting achievement is a backdrop of cheating the financial rules of the administrative body governing European football clubs, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA).
