FRANZ BECKENBAUER

Post by Giorgio Pirelli

The stating goes that behind every wonderful guy lays a fantastic girl and behind every single successful football club lies a very ambitious man.

That was surely the case with the French club Olympique de Marseille of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Marseille have been the most effective club in France as resplendent in their brilliant white soccer uniforms they won the French 1st division (Ligue 1 ) 4 seasons in a row, and their brilliant run of success culminated in 1993, when they grew to become the initial ever (and till now the only) French club to win the European Cup.

The man behind Marseille’s success was Bernard Tapie. Tapie was a highly profitable businessman and sports activities lover who currently ran a cycling staff and had been a minister in the French federal government when he took over Marseille Football Club and made the decision to propel it to the extremely top, not just in France but all over Europe and at some point the Globe. To go after his vision Tapie invested a large sum of cash in the club, signing some of the cream of European players of the era, which includes Jean-Pierre Papin, Chris Waddle, Klaus Allofs, Abedi Pelé, Didier Deschamps, Marcel Desailly, Rudi Völler and Eric Cantona. On the coaching front, Tapie, a highly charismatic character, even succeeded in persuading Kaiser Franz Beckenbauer to leave his beloved Bayern Munich to deal with the club for a time

A man of remarkable ambition and drive, Bernard Tapie saw his dreams grow to be a fact in just a few seasons, when in Might 1993. Basile Boli scored the only aim in the European Champions League last in opposition to A.C. Milan held in the Olympic Stadium in Munich. Following 38 barren many years, France could ultimately boast a team that had won a key European competition It seems unbelievable that just six weeks later on, Marseille’s and Tapie’s earth would be turned upside down as he and his beloved club would be concerned in a scandal that would set the club back five years and tarnish every victory that they had acquired in the decades that Tapie was at the helm. The scandal broke when a player from the mid-table French club Valenciennes, Christophe Robert created allegations to the press that a Marseille player Jean-Jacques Eydelie had created an supply to him and to his group- mates, to throw the game involving the clubs that had taken put a few weeks just before the final. Robert admitted that he had accepted the bribe of 250,000 francs yet triumph over by guilt had not put in it, and rather had buried it in his Aunt’s garden. The make any difference created its way into the police hand’s and soon after some grueling interrogation Eydelie admitted that he had bribed Robert, but below strain from the club’s then standard manager, Jean-Pierre Bernes.. From there on all roads lead to president Bernard Tapie. Tapie eventfully confessed that he had authorized the attempted bribing of the Valenciennes players as he wished to have the league title sown up so as the players could be free to focus on the last from Milan. Marseille had been stripped of the French title that period and later on relegated to the 2nd division not just simply because of the bribing scandal over financial regularities. Tapie, Bernes and Eydelie had been later imprisoned. The bribing scandal forced Marseille to relinquish their 1992-93 Division 1 title and the appropriate to play in the UEFA Champions League 1993-94, the 1993 European Super Cup and the 1993 Intercontinental Cup, as properly as getting demoted to the second division. The scant compensation that Tapie could derive from the whole sordid affair was that his beloved Marseille had been not stripped of their Champions League. Considering that the scandal of 1993 Marseille have failed to win a single trophy and Tapie has gone missing from the French football landscape

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