In May 1993, Marseille became the first French team to win the Champions League, beating
Fabio Capello’s Milan 1-0 at a packed Olympiastadion, courtesy of a Basile Boli header just before
half-time. The celebrations on the streets of Munich
and back home were typically extravagant. Raymond Goethals’ side had completed an
historic double, having secured the Ligue 1 title a week earlier. The Marseille fans
in the stadium were delirious. Those back home celebrated into the night in the south
of France. But things soon changed. It emerged shortly
after that Marseille, in their 1-0 win over Valenciennes on the final day of the Ligue
1 season, had bribed opposition players to ensure that victory.
“It would be hard to imagine a greater football scandal,” wrote Nick Bidwell for the Independent
in July of 1993. “Marseille are France's biggest, best supported and most successful
club and their president, Bernard Tapie, one of the country's most flamboyant figures.”
Tapie, who had taken over the club in 1986, was at the centre of the scandal. He was determined
not to watch his team repeat their near misses of previous years: they had lost the 1991
European Cup final on penalties to Red Star Belgrade, with several players unavailable
due to injury. Though Marseille had put together a run of
four successive Ligue 1 titles, Tapie refused to leave anything to chance. He was so driven
to succeed that he was willing to do anything – including match fixing.
The allegations began with Valenciennes midfielder Christophe Robert, who claimed Marseille player
Jean-Jacques Eydelie and general manager Jean-Pierre Bernes had offered him 250,000 francs to throw
the match. An envelope containing the money was discovered, buried in Robert’s aunt’s
back garden. Jacques Glassmann and Jorge Burruchaga of Valenciennes were presented with the same
offer, too. There had been suspicion during the game when
Robert was substituted after just 23 minutes with a supposed injury. Burruchaga, who had
a reputation for disputing every contentious decision with the referee, was oddly subdued.
Glassman, meanwhile, seemed more determined than ever, charging around the pitch with
a steely look on his face. He had refused the bribe, the only player to turn down Marseille’s
offer. He had even told Valenciennes manager Boro Primorac what was happening at half-time.
Glassman’s vocal opposition to Marseille’s scandalous approach later earned him the FIFA
Fair Play Award in 1995. Immediately after Robert’s money was found,
Marseille’s headquarters were raided. The players had headed to the Pyrenees for a training
camp, but twelve were taken away for questioning. Tapie and Eydelie were imprisoned, charged
with ‘active corruption’, while Robert, Bernes and Burruchaga were handed suspended
sentences. The court case against those involved dragged on until 1995, though, and it was
in the Valenciennes courtroom that the finer details of the scandal came to light.
According to the New York Times’ report of the case, Eydelie revealed that he had
been promised a reduced ban from football if he agreed to testify that Tapie “instigated
the bribes”. Until then, the former midfielder had not accused Marseille’s owner. But he
insisted he was tired “of hearing other people tell lies”.
“It is time to tell the truth,” he said. And that, eventually, is what happened. Eydelie
spoke of the moment plans to fix the Valenciennes match had begun: “Bernard Tapie said to
us, 'It is imperative that you get in touch with your former Nantes team-mates at Valenciennes.
We don't want them acting like idiots and breaking us before the final with Milan.”
The result of a drawn-out trial was a lifetime ban from football for Tapie and Bernes. The
former was forced to resign as Marseille’s president, ending an eight-year hegemony having
been exposed in the most humiliating circumstances. Tapie’s dream of taking Marseille to the
top of the European game – and in the process furthering his business and political career
– had briefly been fulfilled. But he was brought crashing back down to earth.
He had invested huge sums of money in the project, and expected it to be a success,
as with almost all of his other ventures. Tapie’s reputation had been built on rescuing
ailing companies and taking them into the black. Before Marseille, he owned cycling
team La Vie Claire and had a brief tenure as Minister of Urban Affairs in Francois Mitterrand's
government. He clearly considered himself a man of many
talents too, appearing in a stage production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest during
an unexpected sojourn into acting. The Marseille scandal, by the end, had played out like the
most unpredictable of dramas. Tapie proved himself quite a character during
his eight years with the club. “He's convincing because his stories always contain a grain
of truth – just enough to make them plausible,” said French journalist Christophe Bouchet.
“I think he also comes to believe them himself.” Any stories he told in court were not considered
plausible, though. Marseille, in the aftermath of the scandal, were relegated to the second
division and stripped of their Ligue 1 title. It was the end of a period of domination under
Tapie that didn’t look like ending, until it did, abruptly and ignominiously.
It led to further accusations from other clubs, who felt they too had been on the receiving
end of match fixing. CSKA Moscow’s coach Gennadi Kostylev claimed he had been offered
a bribe ahead of a 1992–93 Champions League group stage game, but later withdrew the allegation.
Rangers’ Mark Hateley also publicly revealed that Marseille had tried to persuade him not
to play with a bribe before the two sides met in the Champions League.
And in 2006, Eydelie wrote in his book ‘Je ne joue plus’ that he and other Marseille
players had been given doping injections ahead of the final against Milan. Tony Cascarino,
who would play for the club between 1994 and 1997, told L’Equipe many years later that
he was regularly injected in the back before games.
None of these allegations were proved, but the implication – clearly - is that the
infamous Valenciennes game was not a one off. Arsene Wenger was manager of Monaco at the
time, and he recognised that Marseille’s success was probably not entirely legitimate.
“You hear rumours and after that you cannot come out in the press and say: 'This game
was not regular',” he told the Guardian in 2013.
“You must prove what you say. To come out is difficult. It is very difficult to prove
it. There are little incidents added one to the other. In the end, there is no coincidence.”
Tapie’s willingness to bribe and cheat led to questions about his connections in political
circles too. France, at the time, was beset by scandals and corruption, and Marseille’s
triumph in the Champions League seemed to alleviate some of the cynicism around the
country. But then the allegations came out. “There have been so many scandals in the
last two years that people are getting inured to it, just like traffic jams,” Alain Duhamel,
a political scientist, told the Washington Post in 1993. “People were already cynical
about politics, but soccer was considered a sanctified domain.”
In the end, justice was done, but it was far from the last incident of match fixing to
besmirch football. It left an indelible mark on Marseille too.
The side of 1992-1993 was outstanding. Fabian Barthez started in goal, Boli operated as
sweeper just in front of him, and Goethals had a spine comprising Marcel Desailly, Didier
Deschamps, Alen Boksic and Rudi Völler. The brilliant, three-time African footballer of
the year Abedi Pele completed the front-three. It was, despite the controversy, a magnificent
group of footballers, but unfortunately one which would have its finest moments sullied
and stolen away by their owner’s greed and immorality.