SEPP BLATTER and Michel Platini’s 11-day trial on charges of defrauding Fifa opens today, finally bringing the epic downfall of football’s former world leaders to court.

The fallout from the case ousted Blatter as president of the Swiss-based world governing body of the sport and ended Platini’s campaign to succeed his former mentor. It also removed Platini as president of Uefa, European football’s governing body.

The pair will go on trial in Bellinzona, Switzerland.

In 2015, federal prosecutors in Switzerland revealed their investigation into a $2 million (£1.6m) payment from Fifa to Platini from four years earlier.

The subsidiary charges include forgery of the invoice in 2011 that allowed Blatter to authorise Fifa to pay the 2 million Swiss francs (about £1.6m) that Platini had asked for. The claim was for the former France football great to be paid extra money for being an adviser — without having a contract for it — in Blatter’s first presidential term from 1998 to 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 football, and later in separate appeals at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

Now the case comes to a criminal court, which will sit only until lunchtime each day because of 86-year-old Blatter’s poor health. He is due to be questioned today and Platini tomorrow. Both are expected to give closing statements on June 22, when the trial ends. The three federal judges hearing the case are due to deliver their verdict on July 8. Blatter and Platini each face of up to five years in prison, but suspended sentences are a likely option.

Blatter said in a statement that 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 that Qatar controversially won the hosting rights to this year’s World Cup.

Platini sent his invoice to Fifa in January 2011, only weeks after the World Cup vote. It was quickly paid as Blatter’s next re-election campaign took shape.

Qatar’s top football official, Mohamed bin Hammam, used the momentum of his nation’s rising status in a failed challenge to Blatter. Platini was seen as both Blatter’s presumed heir, likely to take over in 2015, and a key ally Bin Hammam needed to win European votes.

Witnesses due in court include two former elected Fifa and Uefa officials, Angel Maria Villar of Spain and Antonio Mattarese of Italy, and former federal prosecutor Olivier Thormann, who was cleared in 2018 of misconduct in the Fifa investigation.

Thormann will be questioned tomorrow as Platini’s lawyers try to show that the prosecution office colluded with football officials and helped Gianni Infantino become Fifa president in 2016.

Attempts to summon Infantino to be questioned in court have failed. Platini has also filed a criminal complaint in France against Infantino, his former general secretary at Uefa.

Platini and Blatter have both questioned how prosecutors learned about the disputed payment.

Swiss prosecutors began investigating Fifa in November 2014, when the football body filed a criminal complaint about suspected money laundering in bid contests to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Russia and Qatar won those votes by the Fifa executive committee in December 2010.

Swiss authorities seized documents and data at Fifa headquarters on May 27 2015, the day football officials were arrested in Zurich hotels in a separate sprawling United States investigation of corruption.

Three weeks later, the Swiss attorney general at the time, Michael Lauber, said 53 suspect transactions possibly linked to World Cup bidding had been flagged up by banks in Switzerland.

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,” its lawyer Catherine Hohl-Chirazi said in a statement, “so it can be used for the sole purpose for which it was originally intended: football.”