UEFA president Michel Platini delays talks on FIFA election plans
UEFA President Michel Platini has pushed back his deadline to decide whether he will contest the FIFA presidential election next year.
Platini told UEFA's 54 member federations on Thursday that he will discuss the 2015 FIFA and UEFA elections at a round of regional meetings across Europe beginning in October.
"I will be there to listen to you, as usual, and we can then take decisions together," Platini said in French to a UEFA Congress audience that included FIFA President Sepp Blatter.
"As these concern you first and foremost," Platini told European soccer leaders in his keynote speech," we will discuss them all together at (executive program) meetings after the summer."
Last September, Platini told a European soccer meeting in Dubrovnik, Croatia, that he would decide his FIFA intentions "during or after the World Cup in Brazil."
Blatter is expected to seek a fifth four-year term at the May 2015 election in Zurich.
Blatter said last month he will run "if the member associations asked me."
That could happen on June 11 at FIFA's congress in Sao Paulo on the eve of the opening World Cup match.
Platini, a FIFA vice president, has led UEFA since 2007 and has long been seen as the natural successor to 78-year-old Blatter, who was his mentor in soccer politics.
Still, Blatter has shown little sign of fulfilling a promise made at the 2011 UEFA Congress in Paris that his current term in office would be his last.
Blatter said of Platini in his speech to UEFA members Thursday that "sometimes we have not (had) the same ideas... but we keep that friendship."
The next UEFA presidential poll is expected in March 2015 at an election congress in Vienna.
