OM president Pablo Longoria spoke on Tuesday evening of the consequences of OM’s elimination in the third preliminary round of the Champions League. Wanting to be rather reassuring.
He tried to keep smiling, but his “disappointment”, as he repeated it several times, was palpable. A few tens of minutes after OM’s premature elimination in the third preliminary round of the Champions League against Panathinaikos on Tuesday evening, Marseille president Pablo Longoria appeared in the mixed zone in the bowels of the Vélodrome stadium.
“It’s a disappointment, he said. We share the frustration of our supporters … It reminds us how cruel football is, it’s a disappointment today because it was one of the first goals of the season. We had this hope. Tonight we have nothing to reproach with the attitude, the behavior of our players or the game produced in general. But it’s hard. It’s hard.”
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“It changes the season a bit, but the project remains the same”
Returned to the Europa League, OM will therefore be deprived of the copious income of the C1 this season. What will have consequences for the future? “We are still rooted in a project. It does not change the project, Longoria first launched. But it is a great disappointment. I share the frustration of all Marseille residents tonight. It’s a complicated moment. ( …) The difference (between the Champions League and the Europa League) is not as big (as 16 million euros), no. We had projected a season in all the different scenarios. But there is the economic difference , and there is also the difference in prestige between the two competitions. For us, for our supporters, for our sponsors… It changes the season a bit but the project remains the same. We had anticipated this scenario with the responsibilities we must have.”
Quickly railing against arbitration and “a little borderline decisions”, Pablo Longoria also assured that the end of the Marseille transfer window will not be upset by non-qualification for the star scene. “It’s not going to change our ideas about what we wanted to do by the end of the transfer window. What it changes is the attraction we can have by playing in the Champions League to recruit certain players, he slips. (…) We have no financial need to sell players. As I said, we had planned for all the different scenarios.
And to conclude on the ambitions in the Europa League: “Thinking right away about the Europa League, it’s complicated. We have to get our heads straight back in Metz. The Europa League, we’ll think about it later. Tonight, it is above all disappointment and frustration that we have in mind.”