This Wednesday, Marseille woke up to the buzz of tensions surrounding OM. Episodes and rumors keep coming. In the Marseille city, the club occupies a special place. Unique in France. The club’s torments manage to make the news as Marseille welcomes the French rugby team (this Thursday against Namibia) in the World Cup and prepares to receive Pope Francis (this Friday and Saturday).
OM, club turned upside down since a volcanic meeting of leaders with supporters this Monday marked by frontal threats. “You four and your DH coach, if you don’t leave, you’ll see,” according to L’Équipe, thundered Rachid Zeroual, leader of the South Winners, the club’s main group of supporters. “Everyone said what needed to be said. It’s true that Zeroual is a boy who knows the system well, who speaks a little louder than the others. Everyone agreed on what he said. But the Dodgers, the Ultras, everyone spoke,” said René Poutet, president of the Handi Fan Club OM in La Marseillaise.
Shaken OM will play this Thursday in Amsterdam against Ajax in the Europa League. With his head a little (a lot) elsewhere. In this exacerbated context, a keyword emerged on social networks (
Rachid Zeroual found himself at the heart of the chaos in January 2021 when the anger of 300 supporters boiled over and led to the ransacking of the premises of the Commanderie, the OM training camp. He was sentenced to nine months in prison, five of which were suspended. “I am the black beast, they are trying to make us give up, but I have nothing to reproach myself for, I did not enter the Commanderie,” defended the president of the Ultras who, suffering from a illness, leans on crutches. He was also sentenced in 2003 to three months in prison for violence between supporters.
“Rachid is sure of his strength, he shakes you, but he has great tactical sense. He certainly has a power of nuisance but also of attractiveness for the club,” summarized Christophe Bouchet, former president of OM, in Le Monde, referring to the leader of the Winners (Marseille supporters club, born in 1987).
On France 3 in an issue of Pièce à conviction, Rachid Zeroual claimed to have been, in 2012, at the origin of the departure of Didier Deschamps, then coach: “I was not going to let a little dwarf, a little Napoleonic, shout loudly and loudly that he was going to have my head cut off by people in my own town. He had gone to a restaurant, and I went to this restaurant to stir him up a little, to ask him if it was Sarkozy he wanted to send me or the thugs. When I saw that he no longer knew how to answer me, that it was the truth and that I had not been lied to, and that he was stuttering, I gave him advice, which was to leave Marseille Olympic. That if something happened to me, he would follow behind (…). And he left OM. I made her whole body tremble. I told him I would take his head off his shoulders.”
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In Marseille, more than elsewhere, the supporters are the life of the club. Bernard Tapie, during his period as president of OM, made the relationship with supporters an essential starting point. OM thus got into the habit of making 30,000 subscriptions available to supporters’ associations who resold them to their members.
“Who else makes you happier than OM in Marseille? The problem, and our great responsibility, is that we also sometimes make the people of Marseille unhappy…”, Jacques-Henri Eyraud once summed up in Made in Marseille, the Marseille city’s online information site. He, the Parisian who had wanted to put an end to “the OM of chaos, of shenanigans, of legal chronicles” scrapped, suffered, bowed down, before having to step aside. Like Jean-Michel Roussier, Yves Marchand or Christophe Bouchet. “His sidelining from the presidency is a big step,” launched Zeroual in 2021 after the departure of the Parisian entrepreneur.
“If the leaders make decisions unfavorable to these groups, they jump,” reported Louis Acariès, former advisor to Robert Louis-Dreyfus, the former owner of OM, in an investigation by Le Monde. José Anigo added: “What remains within the groups and the history of the ultras? Zeroual, the boss, the last of the Mohicans…” Always quick to blow on the embers. But overtaken by the exasperation of certain supporters.
Among the declared supporters of OM, Julien Benneteau, captain of the women’s Fed Cup team, summed up on , passionate and knowledgeable about football threatened by people who think the club belongs to them…. Pitiful.”