Pressure is building on the Uefa president, Michel Platini, suspended last week for 90 days by Fifa’s ethics committee, before a crisis meeting of all 54 members of the European confederation on Thursday.
Several Uefa members, including the Football Association, are understood to be on the verge of withdrawing their support for Platini if his lawyers cannot provide a contract for a contentious £1.35m payment from the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, in February 2011.
Platini’s predecessor, Lennart Johansson, has claimed that Uefa was never told about the payment at the time.
Meanwhile Fifa’s ethics committee is understood to be confident of completing its investigation into Blatter and Platini within 90 days. It had been speculated that the ethics committee might not be able to complete its work before the provisional suspension expired, thus allowing both to return before an extraordinary Congress on 26 February.
However, the Guardian understands that there is a high level of confidence that the investigations will be finished within the initial 90-day period, without the need for a possible 45-day extension.
The FA chairman, Greg Dyke, is now not expected to travel to Nyon on Thursday because of a previously arranged council meeting. David Gill, the FA director who also sits on the Uefa and Fifa executive committee, will represent the FA instead.
Opinion is believed to be hardening against Platini, who is still listed as president on Uefa’s website but has promised to stand down from official duties while suspended. His lawyers will be under pressure to produce proof that the payment was made under contract and properly accounted for.
The intervention from Johansson, beaten by Blatter to the Fifa presidency in 1998 when the Swiss was aided by Platini, came after the Danish FA chief, Allan Hansen, also threatened to withdraw support if the Frenchman could not produce a contract.
The ethics committee began looking into the case after the Swiss attorney general opened criminal proceedings over a £1.35m “disloyal payment” alleged to be against the interests of Fifa from Blatter to Platini.
Platini has claimed the payment was due as part of an “oral agreement” with Blatter when he acted as an adviser to the Fifa president between January 1999 and June 2002. The Frenchman has said Blatter told him at the time that Fifa did not have enough money to pay him the extra £1.35m on top of the £203,465 he was earning annually as an adviser. Both Blatter and Platini deny any wrongdoing.
The Swede Johansson, who was Uefa president from 1990 to 2007, says that the Fifa executive committee, on which he served, was not told about Platini’s hiring by Blatter. “I was a member of the Fifa executive then and Blatter should have reported it to the executive but he never did. I never heard about this arrangement in Fifa,” said Johansson.
“This is quite a lot of money, not a small amount. I have only learnt through the media that Platini claims that he has a contract with Fifa,” the 85-year-old told the website Inside World Football.
By the time Platini received the payment in 2011 he had replaced Johansson as Uefa president but the Swede continued to attend Uefa executive meetings as honorary president and he says the payment was never disclosed.
“I would have expected this payment to be reported to Uefa. Platini should have mentioned it to the executive. I would have done so. I would have said to the executive, ‘I have a contract with Blatter which you may criticise. But this is the truth, this is the money I received and you should know about it.’”Shortly after the payment was made Platini decided against running against Blatter for the Fifa presidency. Around the same time Fifa agreed to allow Uefa to sell the TV rights to World Cup qualifiers as part of a collective bargaining agreement.
