Concern for the health of players or discrimination against those who were celebrating Ramadan? Locker room talk or harassment? The Nice criminal court rules on Thursday at 1:30 p.m. on the accusations against Christophe Galtier when he was coach of OGC Nice.
At the hearing last Friday, the Nice public prosecutor, Damien Martinelli, requested a one-year suspended prison sentence and a 45,000 euro fine against the ex-PSG coach, who had nevertheless defended himself step by step. .
Returned to Qatar, where his team Al-Duhail is due to play on Thursday afternoon, Galtier, who officiated in Nice during the 2021-22 season, will not be at the hearing, where his lawyers, Mes Sébastien Schapira and Olivier, will represent him. Martin.
On Friday, none of his accusers showed up and the former Olympique de Marseille player remained standing at the bar for eight hours, listening without flinching to the tedious reading of the salient elements of the minutes of the thirty or so hearings carried out in this case, and denouncing the statements he considers false, distorted or misinterpreted.
The affair broke out in April with the revelation by journalists of an inflammatory email from May 2022 from Julien Fournier, then general director of the club, with whom Galtier had execrable relations.
According to this email and the hearing of Fournier, Galtier had complained as early as August 2021 about a team with “too many blacks and Muslims”, in particular after being attacked by people from Nice one evening at the restaurant.
At the hearing, the coach assured that he had only expressed his surprise to long-time members of the staff, including Fournier, after having actually heard “racist comments” about the team at the restaurant.
In their hearings, Fournier and some of those close to him had also mentioned Galtier’s anger at the choice of certain players not to suspend Ramadan on match days, as did, for example, the Muslim players from Lille with whom he had won the championship the previous season.
“Corridor noise”
At the hearing, Hakim Chalabi, medical director of PSG, came to explain the risks that a month of daytime fasting and short nights posed to the players and their performances if it was poorly managed, and that it would be “a malpractice” for a coach to not care.
The investigation noted that the Nice players observing the fast had not been removed from the field. But the prosecutor castigated the “blackmail” of “if you don’t eat, you don’t play”, considering that it amounted to discrimination, even if the player was finally lined up on the field without having complied.
And even if Galtier recalled that Ramadan fell that season in April, in the home stretch of a championship where Nice had high ambitions, the prosecutor noted “an obsessive dimension” in the coach’s attention in the Muslim holy month.
Galtier, continued Damien Martinelli, “exploited” Ramadan to “seek to reduce the number of blacks and Muslims in the team”. All against a background of ordinary racism on which Mr. Galtier is not entirely lucid.
Several Nice players interviewed during the investigation certainly spoke of a discriminatory and racist climate, but only “corridor rumors”, admitting to having never been direct witnesses or victims.
Thus, they reported that the coach did not appreciate traditional outfits. One day he actually complained to Fournier about having seen Jean-Clair Todibo arrive “in traditional dress” at 10:22 a.m. But he explained that he lost his temper because the defender was late and not in training gear.
And if he described two opposing black defenders in front of his players as “King Kong”, it was to evoke “strength and power”, he explained to the audience, ensuring that he had used the same word shortly after for Nantes defender Nicolas Pallois, a white player.
“In the context of hypersensitivity, bananas, monkey cries, how can we imagine that these words will not hurt?”, replied the prosecutor.
