There are the lucky ones who were in Munich, the sweet crazy people who dived in the Old Port, the enthusiasts who paraded on the Canebière. And Francis, 30 years old at the time, all alone in the middle of the road, the engine of his steaming car. Francis does not like football, but he also gives us his emotional memory of the night of May 26, 1993: “I called dozens of mechanics, impossible to bring in just one!” Life stopped that evening in Marseille and throughout the region. “
If Francis remained stranded, it is obviously the fault of Tapie. Because yes, in Marseille, there is no doubt: it is thanks to the businessman that the supporters of OM can boast of being “forever the first” French to have lifted the Champions League. .
He asks Boli to stay on the lawn
“The OM at that time was Tapie, that’s all,” Romain remembers. He had such a stranglehold on the club… ”Adrift when he bought it, in 1985, Bernard Tapie invested heavily in OM, to bring it back to the top of French football (four French championship titles , a cup of France) and at the top, therefore, of European football. An omnipresent, hyper-influential and imposing president. Basile Boli even says that it was Tapie who asked him to stay on the pitch the night of the final against big Milan, despite knee pain. You know the rest …
“It was Tapie who made us win the European Cup”, abounds Jean-Claude. “It was perhaps not very Catholic,” he says. A few weeks after the victory in the Champions League, the biggest corruption scandal in French football, the VA-OM affair, broke out.
“The Champions League was such a feat that, frankly, if he had run for mayor the following week, he would have been elected with 90% of the vote,” continues Francis. Except that the elections were not a week after the title, but two years later. And it is especially the French justice which thwarted the plans of Tapie: 1995, it is also the year of the trial of the case VA-OM, where Tapie was condemned to firm prison. “I was deprived of election”, explained on Antenne 2 Bernard Tapie, the evening of the first round. “The only election that made me want was that of the town hall of Marseille in 1995, for which they hurried to make me ineligible”, he specified in 2015 to the Sunday Newspaper.
” Big mouth “
“At least he had courage, he had a vision for Marseille,” swears one of his supporters at the time, who places him above “Gaudin, with whom it is still very low-key. One of the rare, on this sample of Marseillais which we questioned, to have kept a good image of Bernard Tapie politician. He was deputy of Bouches-du-Rhône then Minister of the City (less than five months in total), European deputy, regional councilor… But they are struggling to name one of his achievements. “Business schools for unemployed young people, maybe? », Tries Antoine. Failed: it is not the political Tapie but the entrepreneur Tapie, who launched these “Tapie sales schools” in 1986 in Béziers.
“It represents the caricature of here, the big mouth side, with not much behind”, slips Gilbert, “Marseillais by adoption for 20 years”. It is from a Marseillais of always, Jérôme, that will come the most violent indictment against the politician Tapie:
Let’s say that he became politically embedded in Marseille, thanks to football, when he was not from here. But it did not resolve any of the substantive issues. He used Marseille for political ends, as he used his fight against the National Front, for that matter. He did all this to make his political career, to win the sympathy of Mitterrand. But insecurity, violence, corruption: it has not changed the problems of Marseille! The other politicians either, by the way …
Controversial takeover of Provence
“Our title has been straightened out under his leadership”. It is a relative, this time, who speaks: Franz-Olivier Giesbert, propelled to the head of the drafting by Bernard Tapie, who bought Provence in 2013. “This newspaper was sinking when he bought it and, today, the embodiment of regional identity, it has found positive results while stopping the decline in circulation”, he wrote in a rave editorial, to the announcement of her boss’s cancer.
For a journalist from La Provence, the appointment of FOG at the head of the editorial staff was above all Tapie’s biggest mistake. “But the latter did not interfere in the decisions of the editorial staff. He sometimes liked to be consulted on subjects on OM, ultimately, it was more in politics that he was trying to influence. As for the last regional when he called to beat the RN, finally it was especially to push the election of Renaud Muselier ”. And above all, Bernard Tapie never succeeded in halting the decline in the distribution of La Provence before his death, contrary to the assertions of Franz-Olivier Giesbert. The newspaper also endorsed the sale of its historic headquarters at the beginning of the year in order to replenish the funds, after two recent economic dismissal procedures.