Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini's 11-day trial on charges of defrauding FIFA starts on Wednesday -- finally bringing the epic downfall of soccer's former world leaders into criminal court.
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The fallout from the case ousted Blatter ahead of schedule as president of FIFA and ended Platini's campaign to succeed his former mentor. It also removed Platini as president of UEFA, the governing body of European soccer.
In 2015, federal prosecutors in Switzerland revealed their investigation into a 2 million Swiss francs ($A2.9 million) payment from FIFA to Platini from four years earlier. The pair will go on trial in Bellinzona, near Locarno.
The subsidiary charges include forgery of the invoice in 2011 that enabled the payment. It claimed the former France soccer great was an advisor -- without having a contract for it -- in Blatter's first presidential term from 1998-2002.
Both have long denied wrongdoing and claim they had a verbal deal in 1998. That defence first failed with judges at the FIFA ethics committee, which banned them from soccer, and later in separate appeals at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Now the case comes to a criminal court which will sit only until lunchtime each day because of the 86-year-old Blatter's health, 18 months after he was in a coma following heart surgery.
Blatter is due to be questioned Wednesday and Platini Thursday. Both are expected to give closing statements on June 22, when the trial ends.
The three federal judges hearing the case are scheduled to deliver their verdict on July 8. Blatter and Platini each face of up to five years in prison, but suspended sentences are a more likely scenario.
Blatter said in a statement everything was accounted for properly and he is optimistic about his chances at the trial. Platini denounced what he called "unfounded and unfair accusations." He has claimed the allegations were fed to prosecutors in a plot to stop him from becoming FIFA president.
Arguments and evidence in court will revisit the widely discredited FIFA political culture during Blatter's 17-year presidency, and around the time Qatar controversially won the hosting rights to this year's World Cup.
In the published indictment, Swiss prosecutors do not cite FIFA politics as a motive for payment. They focus on the facts of Platini being enriched by an allegedly unlawful salary claim and a further 229,000 Swiss francs ($A330,000) of social security taxes paid by FIFA in Zurich.
Attempts to summon current FIFA president Gianni Infantino to be questioned as a witness have failed. Platini has also filed a criminal complaint in France against Infantino, his former general secretary at UEFA.
More than 11 years after Platini was paid, FIFA is trying to recover the money.
"FIFA has brought a civil action against both Blatter and Platini to have the money which was illegally misappropriated repaid to FIFA," the governing body's lawyer, Catherine Hohl-Chirazi, said in a statement, "so it can be used for the sole purpose for which it was originally intended -- football."
Australian Associated Press