Chairmen: Business, Politics and Corruption

Chairmen: Business, Politics and Corruption

It has already been suggested, in the chapter on coaches, that as a broad generalisation the key figure within French football clubs has, from the beginning, been the chairman, the président du club. While this has been a constant over the century of French football, there is not just one single model of club chairman. Previous analyses have suggested that the model of businessman chairman changed in the 1980s, reflecting broader changes in corporate practices over the twentieth century. Claude Bez and Bernard Tapie are cited as emblematic of both a new approach to the football business and the involvement of football and corrupt business practices. While these two larger-than-life characters may have changed the scale of business involvement in football, it will be argued that it is in the 1990s that clubs become part of modern big business in the shape of the big city corporate clubs of the twenty-first century such as Lyon under the chairmanship of Jean-Michel Aulas. For all these changes, the oldstyle small business chairmen do still exist in the smaller professional clubs. Old-style or new-style, the chairman remains in general the dominant figure within the club, but his involvement today may be only partly from the same motivations as the chairmen of old, and the outcomes sought may be different. New Chairmen for Old? Nicollin and Urano In the period of growth of football as a popular sport, after the First World War, many clubs were directed by industrialists and businessmen whose names remain associated with the success of the teams, often through the stadiums, as in the Stade Geoffroy-Guichard at Saint-Etienne. Bromberger recalls how chairmen would provide equipment, deal with transfers and bonuses (that were illegal until the professional era), and often give clubs a stadium, as in the case of the Guichard family (Bromberger et al. 1995: 180). In the 1920s, as football and other sports became more important for municipalities, and the teams became symbols of the whole town rather than of their founding firm, responsibility for most stadiums was taken by the municipality. The inter-war period was the era of the paternalistic chairman, wanting added value for the firm’s image in return for his sponsorship. This was not uncontroversial. In the increasingly highly charged political atmosphere of the 1930s, of clashes between fascist leagues and trade union marches, the Marxist left was highly critical of the exploitation of football by the representatives of capitalism. They worried about the transformation of company clubs into clubs representing a town, and the consequent dilution of class consciousness as players came together from different social classes. The influence of the founding firms remained, however, in the establishment of organisational structures of clubs along the lines of company hierarchies, where the operatives had to follow the orders of the management and bosses. Fridenson (1989: 53) discusses the paternalistic model of discipline of the Peugeot factory and the discourse of productivity in talking about the team. The importance of discipline and hard work was the ethos of teams until the 1970s. Faure and Suaud (1994b: 9–10; 1999: 67–75) show in some detail, and on the basis of interviews with former players, just how the paternalistic ‘dictatorship of the chairman’ operated as part of the structure of the game. He exercised personal power over the small number of club officials and over the players who were treated as part of a ‘family’ and whose ‘life contract’ committed them to total subordination to the fatherly authority of the chairman. The latter’s authority was all the more legitimated as he was apparently committing himself to a gratuitous (and unpaid) task in the interests of the community, but which of course could give immense symbolic capital locally, and which was often the centre of a network of influence. There was another model of chairman, that of Jean Clerfeuille (1959–69) and his successor at Nantes, Louis Fonteneau (1969–86). They were salaried managers within a local company, not entrepreneurs. Rather than using capital from their own company to run the club, like the Laurant brothers at Sedan, they acted, report Faure and Suaud (1994b: 14), out of a sense of integrity, responsibility and service as administrators of the club. Their authority rested on an image of competence and discretion. This model remained clearly a minority one. Faure and Suaud (1994b) and Bromberger et al. (1995: 184–193) analyse the changes in chairmen that show that a new ethos was emerging in the 1980s. D1 clubs’ wage bills increased from 141 million francs in 1980 to 645 million francs in 1988 (Bourg 1989: 163). Gate money did not increase, a doubling of town hall subsidies did not cover this increase, therefore deficits of clubs rose, and money came in from business. Importantly, the role of club chairman in these new circumstances attracted a new type of entrepreneur. Bourg (1986: 79) has shown that in the 1984/85 season, of the 20 D1 club chairmen, 17 were chairmen and managing directors of private companies, but not from the traditional industrial manufacturing sector. Rather they represented newer types of firm, media, advertising, construction firms, property developers, distribution. Marcel Leclerc (OM) was head of a sporting press group; Jean-Luc Lagardère (Racing) was chairman of Matra-Hachette (armaments, radio, press and publishing). In the new context, Bromberger’s ethnographic study concludes that football clubs no longer embodied paternalism or the productivity and discipline of the factory, but a ‘social project that matched the [new] spirit of the age’ where organisation of work and industrial relations and objectives were conceived very differently. The values of professionalism replaced those of the voluntary sector (le bénévolat) that had hitherto been the cornerstone of clubs. Local notables putting time and effort into a hobby were being excluded and replaced by business managers wanting a return on investment. The clubs’ business management was being professionalised, and merchandising introduced. The role of the ‘association’, its elected officers and its ‘deliberative assemblies’ was reduced. Bernard Tapie (OM) and Claude Bez (Bordeaux), examples examined below, are typical of the new chairmen of the 1980s. Tapie is quoted as saying: ‘A football club should be run like a business’ (France Football, 4 February 1986: 8, cited by Bromberger et al. 1995: 185). Lagardère said his involvement was not simply through ‘personal passion’ (Bromberger et al. 1995: 71). This new approach created a break between the club and the supporters who were active members of the association. The professionalisation of the sport and the transformation of the spectacle into a commodity fitted ill with the old legal framework of the non-profit-making association run by unpaid volunteers. Indeed, legal changes to the laws of sporting organisations were introduced in 1984 and 1992. New models of clubs had values of professionalism, expertise, competence, competitiveness, performance, the will to win. Sponsors in particular needed to see what they were getting for their money. The new generation of chairmen that Bromberger calls the ‘boss generation’ (Bromberger et al. 1995: 188) sought permanent visibility and personal recognition in the media, whereas chairmen had previously stayed in the background. The football club became the means by which the chairman and his other companies got coverage and communicated their image. Appearance became all. Bromberger notes that ostentatious consumption, displays of wealth, and quickly earned fortunes became more acceptable within society (he quotes opinion polls, p. 188). Winning becomes more important than taking part. There is no room for sentiment such as might have given a place to Jean Tigana in OM’s European Cup Final team of 1991 in his last season. Teams and clubs reflected therefore how one type of entrepreneurial logic had been replaced by another over the course of the twentieth century: the first based success on discipline, authority, hierarchy and discretion, the other on participation, consensus, risk taking, and appearance in the media. Business and management began using sporting metaphors rather than the other way round. Sportsmen began to be used to give team-building seminars in companies. ‘Previously the team was compared to a company, now the company is compared to a team. Football, for a long time a belated reflection of the world of manufacturing industry, seems to have become in the eyes of business managers the vector of a new social project’ (ibid.: 191). Football has become a modern myth that allows society to think about how best to live together. This chronological distinction would be misleading if it were taken to mean that all the professional clubs suddenly changed structures and ethos, and that the old model of chairman disappeared over a couple of seasons. In some of the smaller clubs old-style chairmen still operate, some of whom have emerged fairly recently. Two such chairmen are Louis Nicollin, long-time boss of Montpellier, and a recent arrival, Pascal Urano of Sedan. Louis Nicollin: ‘my club is my passion ’ As 99 per cent long-term owner of the Montpellier-Hérault Sports Club, ‘Loulou’ Nicollin regards it as more of a daughter than a mistress, but his whole approach to club chairmanship is reminiscent of bygone days. He employs his ex-players in his companies, and uses the term ‘family’ to describe the Montpellier club. Libération portrays him as a truculent, Gitane-smoking, old-style, overweight businessman and local notable, who is easily roused to fits of temper and whose business decisions regarding the club are more passionate than rational. He has been disinclined to share power with any other potential investor since he took over in 1974. He does, however, despite his own right-wing convictions, have to work with the local municipality and the long-standing socialist mayor Georges Frêche, who happens to be equally keen to use the football club to promote the town. Nicollin’s own business is in refuse collection, and dependent on 300 municipal contracts in the region. He has used his sporting contacts in his businesses. He admits that ‘if you go to a town to tender for a contract, and you are known through football, it does no harm’ (France Football, 18 January 2002: 15). He was fined, on the island of Réunion, for trying to win the main town’s refuse collection contact by giving 2 million francs to the local football club (Revault d’Alonnes 2001b). He also owns nearby Béziers rugby club. Pascal Urano: a Throwback to the Traditional Chairman When in November 2000 the CS Sedan-Ardennes found themselves on top of the French Division 1, it is open to speculation how the chairman Pascal Urano celebrated. In the previous season, on reaching the French Cup Final when still in Division 2, he took some friends to a restaurant to celebrate, so L ’Equipe recounts (7 November 2000: 8), but found the only free tables were in a back room already booked for the club’s players. He simply took over the table, and the on-field heroes had to go to a player’s flat to eat their pizzas. In the same article (Dupont 2000), as if to ram home the point that in Sedan what Monsieur Urano wants Monsieur Urano gets, we read that, on another occasion, to avoid waiting in a full restaurant he apparently paid the bill of a table of diners who were nearly finished on condition that they left immediately. He is, it would appear, as feared as the club’s mascot, a wild boar. To understand how smaller professional French clubs operate, anecdotes about personal characteristics, which easily turn into caricatures, are however less interesting than looking at the structures within which a chairman operates. The Sedan and Montpellier cases illuminate the long-standing tradition of a network of influences that tie together local politics, local business and local sport. In Urano’s case he is at the centre of this network and appears to be one of the most powerful men in Sedan and the region. He became a successful businessman since unexpectedly having to take over the family construction business and give up his studies in 1980 at the age of 20. He built up the business from 200 to 500 employees and into five separate companies. He added to it the local Mercedes concession, opened with some pomp in 1996 in the presence of the Olympic judo gold medallist David Douillet, one of the most popular personalities in France, and Gérard Houllier, then National Technical Director of French football. Urano took a minor interest in the club in 1992, an interest that became more important as the club’s financial problems worsened. L ’Equipe claims he spent 25 million francs on the club between 1993 and 1999, and recounts a number of business operations that imply, fairly or unfairly, the possibility of bullying, cutting corners or even sharp practice, but which all bear witness to his ability to make things happen locally (Dupont 2000). Among the details given are the following. Firstly, on relegation from Division 2 in 1995, the then chairman announced that he and Urano were both withdrawing from the club. Urano immediately, overnight and at his own expense, dismantled two television gantries that his companies had constructed. He was persuaded to stay with the club by the mayor, and became indispensable when in June 1998 he had to act as guarantor of the club’s debts of almost 7 million francs to prevent them from losing their professional status and therefore being refused promotion back to Division 2 at an appeal hearing of the League’s financial commission, the DNCG (see p. 168). He soon afterwards, L ’Equipe reports, began employing one of the former members of the DNCG. Secondly, the same article recounts how his building of a new football stadium for the club in double-quick time was overshadowed by the manner in which the town council, on a technicality, overturned a first choice of tender to award the contract for its construction to a company that appears to have sub-contracted part of the work to Urano, who supervised much of the building. Sedan has fewer inhabitants than the number of seats in the new stadium, but a large stadium is necessary if the club wants to play in Europe. The building and maintenance costs to the local taxpayers are high. Whereas he had previously been a supporter of the right-wing mayoral candidate, he contributed financially to the victorious campaign of the outgoing mayor in 1995. Finally, Urano’s companies are very influential bidders in local public procurement building contracts since he holds a near monopoly locally over the supply of the key construction material of gravel. Since his involvement in the construction of the stadium, he has become chairman of the club (September 2000). He has professionalised the running of the club, marginalising the unpaid volunteers who formerly helped during matches. In the past, as in the case of Nicollin, there has generally been an element of passion as well as calculation in the involvement of small businessmen with football. In Urano’s case though there is room for doubt in this respect, by his own admission. This son of an Italian immigrant seems to be a businessman through and through who finds it difficult not to be curious about the business side of everything. As he says: ‘I can’t enter a place without wondering if the shop is operating at a profit. When I go to the cinema, I calculate the turnover on the performance.’ On the one hand he claims that he is not in football for the money, that it does not pay in normal commercial terms; on the other he states: ‘The money is not a gift, it is an investment. I am not a philanthropist’ (Dupont 2000). In under a decade, his involvement with Sedan has undoubtedly turned a small-town club in a not particularly well-off rural region, but with a footballing tradition, into a club that counts again within French football. He has professionalised it, and run it in a business-like way, but his relationships within the club recall an earlier tradition of chairman. His relationships with business and politics outside the club and the way he makes things happen (if L ’Equipe’s details are taken at face value) appear to be based on the traditional clientelism, deals and networks that have long characterised French politics and business. The Modern Businessman Chairman: the Bez–Tapie Era The three names of club chairman best known to fans in the modern era are Roger Rocher of Saint-Etienne, Claude Bez of Bordeaux and Bernard Tapie of Marseille. They all appeared to be successful businessmen and contributed enormously to the successes of their club. All ended up in jail for corrupt practices. The latter two have been credited with changing how French football clubs are run.

Roger Rocher took over as chairman of AS Saint-Etienne in the glory years from 1961 to 1982. He was old-fashioned in his relations with his players, intolerant of any questioning of his authority. He fell partly because results eventually stopped coming, and because of his age and his policy of buying star players rather than relying on the youth scheme favoured by manager Herbin. Internal disputes over policy led to rumours of a slush fund and under-thecounter payments to players (l’affaire des caisses noires – Rocher’s ‘war chest’ as he preferred to call it). The AGM of the association in December 1983 was a rowdy eight-hour session full of insults and was the beginning of the end of Rocher, who, along with others on both sides of the dispute, were charged with fraud. A number of players (including Platini) and manager Herbin were found guilty of taking illegal payments. In 1991 Rocher, who had already spent four months in preventative detention, was found guilty on appeal and condemned to three years in jail, with the remaining 32 months suspended. He was given a presidential pardon later in the year, and died in 1997. The Saint-Etienne finances never really recovered, and the club has never recaptured its former glories. Claude Bez and the Modernisation of the Football Business Under the leadership of mayor Chaban-Delmas, Bordeaux led the way among French cities in using the modern football business and in making the club a symbol of the city and the region on the national and international stage (see Chapter 3). The person who made it happen was Claude Bez, chairman of Girondins de Bordeaux from 1978 to 1990. Under his leadership the club was undoubtedly, in the 1980s, the dominant force in French football: French champions three times and European semi-finalists twice. He saw that the financial side of sport was turning into big business, and so he brought in modern business methods to run the club on the model of Barcelona or Juventus. His methods were subsequently copied elsewhere in France. He used the tools of marketing, commercialisation, sponsorship, advertising, and set about creating a modern image for the club and indeed for himself, as a larger-than-life, Bentleydriving cavalier leader, with immediately recognisable drooping moustaches. As unpaid chairman, Bez spent 15 hours a week on club business. Bourg judges that it was the glory and recognition that motivated him (1986: 75–76). Bez saw money as a means, not as an end in itself: ‘The basis of my personal philosophy is power. And money, for me, is just the instrument of power’ (interview in France Football, 27 October 1984, cited in Faure and Suaud 1994b: 15). In football terms this led to a policy of buying success, the quick fix rather than relying long term on developing a club by producing players through a youth policy.

As the boss of a successful chartered accountancy firm, he came into the club executive as (unpaid) treasurer in 1974 at the age of 33; six months later he was vice-president; and he became chairman four years later. At his first meeting with mayor Chaban, he promised him a great team, but added it would cost the city a lot of money (Rousseau 1999). One of his key innovations was as a pioneer in the sale of television rights. As chairman of the top club of the time he broke an agreement to alternate European rights between TF1 and Canal+, thus changing the balance of power between clubs and TV channels, and beginning the rise in television income for French clubs. He also increased sponsorship income from corporate sources, in the case of Bordeaux from Opel cars. This new income allowed him to buy international players. He changed relationships with the supporters, setting up official supporters clubs, club shops for merchandise, and increasing the numbers of season ticket holders. The club was the first to install private boxes for a new kind of audience (in 1986). In the 1980s Bordeaux had the biggest municipal grant of all French clubs, the biggest advertising income, and the highest gate receipts (Bourg 1986: 146). His relations with his players elicited tributes on his death in 1999, saying he had been a ‘man of his word’ (from Battiston, Platini, and Trésor). This suggests that his man-management style was in the old-fashioned manner of the family club. He also knew how to attract publicity by theatrical gestures. As a protest against the Federation’s suspension of his goalkeeper, he picked his smallest and best outfield player Alain Giresse in goal for the next match. His influence in French football went wider than his club. He was instrumental in Platini replacing Henri Michel as national team selector in 1988, such was his power within the Federation and League at the time (Rousseau 1999). His highly publicised personal feud with Bernard Tapie attracted much publicity and comparisons with Dallas’s unscrupulous businessman character J. R. Ewing (Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 October 1990, cited by Rousseau 1999). The feud of these two heavyweights was perhaps inevitable given the historic rivalry between the two major cities of the south, but it gained venom over the surprise transfer of Bordeaux star Giresse to OM in 1986. Bez also accused Tapie of trying to bribe one of his players, whereas Tapie accused Bez of having his hand in the till. His downfall came following an early exit from the European Cup in the first round in 1985/86. This was expensive given that the club’s budgetary calculations were based on greater income from this lucrative competition, and so began the financial destabilisation of the club. The disclosure of ten million francs of tax debts in 1989 was followed in November 1990 by the publication by mayor Chaban of an internal audit revealing a deficit of 242 million francs. Charged with fraud, tax problems, and irregularities regarding transfers and the organisation of matches, he resigned, was convicted and sentenced in June 1995 to three years in prison (two of them suspended) and a fine of 2 million francs. The charges of fraud concerned his personal affairs as well as his stewardship of Bordeaux. He was due to appear in court again in 1999, but he was already an ill man and died of a heart attack. Bernard Tapie, Football and Politics as ‘Soap ’ Just as the transition of Bordeaux had its political dimension, so, with other clubs, some politicians have attempted to harness themselves to successful teams for political gain. Most national politicians in France keep their local base, often as mayor of a medium or large town, where clientelism and the old-boy networks are important political tools. The links between local municipal politics, tendering for local public works contracts, and the occult financing of political parties and election campaigns have more and more come into the open as the courts have felt freer from national political pressures. Add to this the complexities of football finances within the strait-jacket of the 1901 law, and it is no wonder that some prominent individuals have over-reached themselves and suffered the inevitable consequences of trying to accommodate football, business and politics. The most prominent example has been Bernard Tapie, who entered local and national politics via business and sport rather than the other way round. Born in 1943, he was listed as fifty-second richest person in France in 1988, worth at least 0.8 billion francs (£80 million) (Frémy and Frémy 1991: 1860). After dabbling in the pop industry, he had set up a holding company in 1979 and became a wealthy tycoon. He specialised in taking over firms in difficulty: la Vie claire (1980), Toshiba France (1982), Wonder batteries, Wrangler France, Kickers, Soft Mazda (1984) and turning them temporarily at least into going concerns. In other words he was an asset stripper. He enjoyed an ostentatiously flamboyant lifestyle, and moored his yacht in Marseille harbour. He came into politics having been invited by the long-term mayor of Marseille, Gaston Defferre, a key government minister and baron of the Socialist party, to become chairman of OM in April 1986. As seen in rival right-wing Bordeaux, a successful local club was important for local politics. Tapie’s millions could just do the trick – he offered to put aside 500 million francs per year from his business group to invest in OM (Bourg 1986: 78). At first he was successful on all three fronts: football, business and politics. From seventeenth and twelfth in 1985 and 1986 respectively, OM finished second to Bordeaux in Tapie’s first full season as chairman and won the championship five times in a row from 1989 onwards, and the European Cup in 1993. As a self-made business man with political ambitions but no local base, Tapie recognised in the city of Marseille an unrivalled opportunity to establish political roots, with the mayor’s office as the final goal with Defferre’s blessing. His notoriety was already worth millions of francs in publicity for the club. His TV appearances turned him into a guru of modern business management. As the only politician of the left willing to take on Jean-Marie Le Pen in TV debates, his self-confident, man-of-the-people gift of the gab made him both the darling of the political left and a favourite with voters. He stood for parliament and was elected in 1989 in a constituency near Marseille after his 1988 defeat had been annulled by the Constitutional Council. He was re-elected in 1993. He became minister for cities in the Bérégovoy government of 1992/93. He is credited with being pushed by Mitterrand to lead a left-wing Radical list in the European elections of 1994 to ruin Michel Rocard’s chances of taking over the Socialist Party on Mitterrand’s eventual retirement, and was an MEP until 1997. For a while he was even spoken of as a possible left-wing candidate for the presidential election when Jacques Delors withdrew. However, by then, it was too late, since his business affairs had begun to fail and he was under corruption charges in his position as chairman of OM. Initially, he had inflated the transfer and salary market by buying in top international players and managers. He knew he could use his political protection to persuade the nationalised banks to back him. He bought Adidas in 1990. He openly spoke of image being everything. ‘A company’s health is measured not only by its economic performance, but by the quality of its industrial relations, which are good if people are proud of what they are doing. Sporting success is a guarantee in this respect. People can fully identify with it’ (Bourg 1986: 78). Tapie created his own commercial structure of which he was the majority shareholder, but retained the Association 1901 for the club in order to remain within the FFF rules. As in the case of Bordeaux, problems came from banking too early on success in Europe. The pressure to succeed was such that it appears that at the end of the 1992/93 season, in order to ensure winning the championship and therefore continued presence in Europe, bribes were offered to Valenciennes players, one of whom (Jacques Glassmann) was so outraged that he revealed the approach, and was eventually listened to. The affair finally went to court, and to appeal, but Marseille ended up being punished by relegation on top of bankruptcy, and Tapie left the club in December 1994. He was banned from French football for two years. (For details, see Assouly 2000; Bordenave 2001; Gattegno 2001.) Tapie and other club officials were investigated, and charged in the criminal courts with bribery and suborning a witness, false accounting regarding the OM finances and regarding his Testut company, and for tax evasion over his yacht. The affair was dragged out until after the presidential election – national politics oblige, and then further on appeal. Tapie was sentenced to prison terms on all four of the counts, ineligibility for public office for three years, a fiveyear ban from business activity, and huge fines. (See L ’Equipe, 4 April 2001: 2, and Bordenave 2001, for summaries of his judicial history.) By then he was already bankrupt and had lost his political credibility. And that seemed to be that, but Tapie and the world of football in Marseille are curious creatures. Robert Gildea sums them up quite neatly:

Both he and his football team were corrupt, but his corruption was seen as somehow thumbing his nose at the establishment. The fact that the courts confiscated his yacht and furniture for tax evasion and the Crédit Lyonnais pursued him for debts only served to confirm his Robin Hood status with his have-not supporters. He was the antithesis of the ‘governmental’ socialist Michel Rocard: in revolt against the taxman, the big banks, the judicial system, a tribune of the people emerging from the ruins of the classic Left . . . Tapie was politics as soap, now up, now down, but always fighting back and always in the public limelight. (Gildea 1997: 200) Gildea could have added that in Marseille being anti-establishment meant also being anti-Paris, which added to Tapie’s attraction. He was emblematic of a new form of demagogic politics and a new form of unscrupulous, winningis-everything running of a football club. Politically he benefited from and in the end contributed to the political alienation of a French electorate that has become very sceptical about the motivations and morality of its traditional political class. He emerged from prison in July 1997 having spent in total no more than 165 days behind bars. He appeared in a Lelouch film, wrote a novel with a football setting, was engaged for a radio talk show then a TV talk show (on satellite channel RTL9), and played the Jack Nicholson role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo ’s Nest on stage in a touring company. However, in the northern suburbs of Marseille, where footballing success is more important than establishment politics, such was OM’s plight that there were calls from the terraces for the miracle worker’s return, and such was the owner’s desperation that he called in Tapie as Director of Football and prospective saviour of the club. Tapie was called chairman Louis-Dreyfus’s final card – the Swiss boss of Adidas had already sunk £90 million of his own money into OM (Chaumier and Rocheteau 2001: 276). This sum had risen to £100 million by the end of season 2001/02 (Henry 2002). Tapie believes he still has a political constituency and a political future once his political ineligibility ends in 2003, and that he can convince the courts that the Crédit Lyonnais bank diddled him out of millions in the sale of Adidas in 1993, which wrongly led to his bankruptcy. As Le Monde commented, he has not forgotten how his sporting victories prepared his political success, and how both guaranteed his business continuity and the confidence of public sector investors and of the nationalised bank, the Crédit Lyonnais (Gattegno 2001).

He started his comeback by stepping back into football, but few believe that is an end in itself. Success did not immediately follow, and maybe the links between sport, business and politics are no longer quite the same as they were. Or are they? What shocked many outside football is that following an apparent clean-up of the game after the Bez and Tapie affairs, and the setting up of the DNCG (see p. 168) to prevent football clubs running on deficits, there were so few protests from inside the game at Tapie’s return. The World Cup win had been a breath of fresh air for the game, along with the values of modesty, integrity and hard work attributed to coach Aimé Jacquet. Le Monde’s editorial of 5 April 2001 considered the return of ‘chancers’ into the game as a step in the wrong direction. The murky affairs of OM continued when, after prolonged internal wrangles and restructuring, and interventions by chairman Louis-Dreyfus to get to the bottom of what he called ‘Mafia-like practices within the club’, the public prosecutor’s office announced in April 2002 an investigation into possible links between OM and organised crime (Le Monde, 16 April 2002). Tapie left the club, chairman Louis-Dreyfus restructured the management, and nothing came of the investigation, which was dropped. Regulating the Business Side: Sports Legislation or SelfRegulation? Over the years, but in the 1980s particularly, changes in the economic and ideological climate and the changing relationship between sport and business (and its abuse) persuaded the football authorities and government to amend the legislation regulating professional sports clubs. Government became aware of the business restrictions imposed on clubs within the framework of the 1901 law, and legislated on the organisation of professional sport in 1975, 1984, 1992, 1999 and 2000. The 1984 and 1992 reforms aimed to reinforce the economic aspect of professional sport, whereas the Buffet law of 2000 drew a line in the sand regarding further deregulation of clubs’ business activities. The major innovation of the football authorities, the new financial regulatory body, the DNCG, was a means by which the Federation retained control of the professional clubs. La loi Mazeaud (1975) In 1975 the right-wing Youth and Sports Minister Pierre Mazeaud spelled out the implications of French law for professional sport when there was an attempted break-away of a professional league from the French Basketball Federation. He confirmed, for football and other sports, that professional clubs were subordinate to their sports federation. France is unique in Europe in terms of the State’s tutelage over sport. The State was determined to maintain its power over sport to keep it in the public domain and to protect it from the laws of the free market, and to maintain close financial and fiscal scrutiny over professional sports clubs and players. The law stated that sports clubs must be constituted either (as before) under the law of 1901 regulating non-profit-making associations or under business law as a société d’économie mixte, a mixed public and private company. The SEMS (société d’économie mixte sportive) allowed a local authority to hold a minority of shares in a company, but with a risk of losing money. The sports association (alone or in conjunction with the local authority) must hold the majority of capital and voting rights. Its accounts were subject to closer scrutiny under the law. Very few clubs took up the new option. The financial state of football did not improve. The most famous post-war club, Reims, went bankrupt in 1978, after Red Star, Rouen and Rennes. The collective debts of the remaining professional football clubs reached 90 million francs by 1983, therefore threatening the budgets of the local authorities that sponsored them, at which point government decided to look again at the laws regulating professional sport (Faure and Suaud 1999: 40). La loi Avice (1984) and its Modifications The next sports law, the loi Avice, and its later modifications were intended, as Faure and Suaud interpret it (1999: 40–41), to ensure a more rigorous control of clubs’ financial management. It forced professional sports clubs with an annual turnover of more than 2.5 million francs to constitute themselves into a SEMS or into a SAOS (société anonyme à objet sportif ). In an SAOS the club’s original association must hold one-third of the shares in order to have a blocking minority, so the amateur club still remained in principle in control of the professional team. The SAOS is otherwise much like a limited liability company, but cannot pay out profits to shareholders. The change was none the less unpopular with the sports traditionalists supporting the autonomy of French sport and its separation from business values. Most big clubs became SAOS by the end of the 1990s. Bernard Tapie got round the legislation by creating a société de participation of which he was the major shareholder (60 per cent), the club 39 per cent and the city 1 per cent. To hide this structure not recognised by the Federation, the association still existed and looked after day-to-day matters. The right-wing governments of 1993–97 recognised that local authority subventions to professional clubs were illegal, for clubs that were trading commercially in the form of SAOS or SEM, which was almost all. Henceforward they could only get sponsorship from French regional authorities (Echégut 1994: 21). The Sports Minister of the later left-wing government, Mme Buffet, managed to delay the implementation of this. Private investors could henceforward buy two-thirds of the capital, although the ban on paying dividends was a serious discouragement La DNCG (Direction Nationale de Contrôle de Gestion) A government decree of April 1990 set up a body, the DNCG, to scrutinise the administrative and financial management of football clubs under the control of the FFF. It is a financial regulator made up of independent financial experts who examine the accounts of all professional clubs to prevent them from going too far into the red. It is a means of self-regulation, since it reports to the Federation, and has been interpreted as an attempt by the latter to exert control over the big clubs (Faure and Suaud 1999). The League only has one-fifth of the votes in the general assembly of the FFF, where the whole French ‘football family’ is so heavily represented as to ensure the domination of the governing body by representatives of the amateur game. One of the DNCG’s instigators was Noël Le Graët, then chairman of the small Division 2 club, Guingamp. The strength of the anti-commercial lobby that he represented in the early 1990s, even among professional league clubs, is further shown by his election to the chairmanship of the League management body in 1991. His platform was based on opposition to the entry of economic liberalism and free enterprise into football. The existence of the DNCG underlines the theoretical control of the FFF over the League, since the DNCG can prevent a club from buying players, or even strip a club of its professional status and indeed relegate it from Division 1 and/or Division 2 into Division 3 (the National), as happened to Toulouse in 2001. Faure and Suaud (1994b: 24–25) criticise this body as being in hock to the amateur game and to the small clubs, therefore having a vested interest in preserving the status quo. Its effect, as Eastham (1999: 75) shows, was gradually to wipe out Division 1 clubs’ debts – at least until the 2001/02 season. It is criticised, however, by the bigger clubs as stifling their ability to compete with major clubs in England, Spain and Italy who have no such regulator to prevent them from speculating in the transfer market and running up huge deficits. Its longer term authority vis-à-vis the bigger clubs may be questioned in the light of 2002 figures regarding the deficits of OM in particular. On average, salaries more than doubled over six years to 2001 and French clubs’ transfer dealings showed a deficit. The total debts of the D1 clubs for the season 2000/ 01 had risen spectacularly to 53 million euros (over £30 million), most of which were attributable to PSG and OM, especially the latter who accounted for 72 per cent of the deficit. OM has been in deficit since 1995/96. The DNCG threatened the club with relegation but withdrew it on presentation of a letter of credit by OM’s chairman, Robert Louis-Dreyfus, the owner of Adidas, which is a huge sponsor of football in France and the world (see Hare 1999b). PSG’s accounts also showed a deficit for the third year running, but the club has, so far, been protected by Canal+. As L ’Equipe (13 March 2002: 6) commented, the DNCG had been much more heavy handed with less fashionable clubs. One might add that Adidas, in its sponsorship contracts with league clubs, and Canal+, with its TV money, are vital to the financial equilibrium of French football as a whole. OM and PSG are also the only two French clubs represented among the top European clubs that formed the G14 group in September 2000 as a lobbying group vis-à-vis UEFA and FIFA. The lois Buffet (1999 and 2000) In her 1999 and 2000 legislation the communist sports minister went another step along the way to allowing professional clubs to become limited companies, but not as far as the League wanted. Various elements of the law and its decrees upset the whole of the French sports movement, as represented by the CNOSF as well as the UCPF. Mme Buffet’s aims were to regulate the relationship of professional sport with society as a whole and with amateur sport. In particular she wanted to bring the trend towards the domination of sport by business values under some form of democratic control. For her, sport was an area where ‘money must not be able to dictate its own laws’ (Bezat 2000). The preamble of her bill justified this by referring to the public service mission of sport, its contribution to social cohesion, its part in the struggle against social inequality, and the need to democratise physical exercise and sport. The sports federations were defined as the key tools through which the State could ensure that sport’s public service mission was carried out. (See LNF Infos, issue 21, October 1999: 4–5.) A new type of company was created, the SASP (société anonyme sportive et professionnelle), which ten D1 clubs adopted in 2001/02, as an alternative to the SAOS. This means a club can operate as a limited company with various constraints. It allows dividends to be paid to shareholders, and chairmen of clubs to be paid a salary for the first time, but its shares cannot be bought and sold on the Bourse. Whereas in a SAOS the non-profit-making association must hold a blocking minority of one-third of shares, in a SASP it may give up its shares. But the registration of the club with the FFF is still held by the Association, which also owns the name, the brand and other distinctive signs of the club. The Association is responsible for the amateur section of the club and the company for the professional section, but they share responsibility for ‘la formation’ (youth training) (Potet 2002; Bourzat and Breillat 2001). The law also reinforced the regulation concerning young players who were to be obliged to sign an initial three-year contract with the club whose academy they were trained in. Players’ agents were to be regulated and would have to register with the FFF. They would not be allowed to sign contracts with players under the age of eighteen. Two controversial parts of Mme Buffet’s legislation concerned television rights. First a 5 per cent top slice off television rights paid to football, rugby, tennis and other sports was to go annually to the FNDS to finance amateur sport, which the UCPF estimated at a loss of 100 million francs per year to football clubs (Potet 2001f). Even more seriously in the eyes of the big professional clubs, by law the sports federations were deemed to own all television rights for their sport, with the ability to delegate them in part to professional leagues or clubs. This was in a sense the key to Mme Buffet’s attempt to claw back control over sport from the big business interests that she saw as taking it over to the federations and hence to publicly accountable authorities. In late 2001 the professional football club chairmen, feeling the new laws had simply given with one hand and taken more way with the other, appealed to Brussels, citing European competition law in an attempt to regain control over these rights. As evidence, they commissioned a report by Deloitte and Touche on the restrictive laws under which French clubs operate compared to other European clubs. The report claims that French clubs have lost ground economically on English, Italian, Spanish and German clubs, and that the reasons are structural: they no longer own their TV rights nor their image rights, nor their registration with the FFF (which is now owned solely by the club’s nonprofit-making association). They cannot trade their shares on the stock exchange. They are penalised by higher taxes and social costs than elsewhere. The gap in turnover for French and other European clubs has widened since 1995 (Potet 2001f; Mislin 2001). After the change of government in 2002, the new sports minister, the former fencing champion J.-F. Lamour, appeared more sympathetic to the business needs of professional clubs. Modern Corporate Involvement: J.-M. Aulas The movement for change within French professional football is being led by chairmen of the bigger clubs, headed by the ones that have come as close as the law will allow to becoming true businesses, and by Jean-Michel Aulas of Lyon in particular. It was not a coincidence that these same big league clubs, in the same year (1990) as the creation of the Federation’s financial regulator of professional clubs, set up their own Union of Professional Football Clubs (UCPF). They have ambitions for it to take the place of the present League Management Committee as the real employers’ representative body, which would mean cutting themselves off unilaterally from the rest of French football. The involvement of major private finance in the big clubs has happened in the 1990s. Most of the big-budget clubs are owned or controlled by major companies: PSG (owned by Canal+, and ultimately by Vivendi-Universal), Lyon (controlled by the media group Pathé), Marseille (by the sport and leisure equipment company Adidas), Bordeaux (owned by the television channel M6, and indirectly by the media group CLT-UFA), Strasbourg (by the American sports management group McCormack), Rennes (controlled by the PinaultPrintemps-Redoute distribution and luxury goods group), and Nantes (by la Socpresse of the Hersant/Figaro press group). Two further big clubs are Monaco (under the control of the royal family) and Lens (that has managed to spread its ownership around local companies). This situation recalls what Le Graët was warning against in 1991 when he foresaw, if business values were given their head, professional football being limited to the ‘Paris region and the three or four big metropolises where there are multinational companies’ with no clubs in the provinces (Libération, 13 March 1991, cited by Faure and Suaud 1999: 47). The involvement of big business has coincided with the increase in money coming into football from television rights, sponsorship and merchandising, and from increasing Europeanisation of football through the Champions League, a competition forced on UEFA by the richest European clubs. The new competition replaced the old European (Champions) Cup, where only one team per country (the reigning league champions) could compete. The new competition is open to three or four clubs from the bigger countries (i.e. those with lucrative television audiences) and operates on a mini-league system (until 2003 two successive mini-leagues) before a brief knock-out stage. Since there is no risk of an early exit, this structure guarantees more games for a club and for every national television company that buys the TV rights. UEFA has control over the distribution of TV income and guarantees huge pay-outs for the clubs. In the 1999/2000 season, all 32 participating clubs were guaranteed approximately £1.9 million, plus bonuses for wins and draws, for the first stage matches alone. Playing in the second group stage would bring in over £1 million to a club, even if all matches were lost. The eventual winner could expect overall at least £10 million income from UEFA (Mislin 1999). This has significantly increased the number of games played: in 1976 Saint-Etienne needed only eight matches to qualify for the final; from 1999 the system required 16. Overall 157 matches were played (and televised somewhere) in the 1999/2000 competition. European participation is a much bigger part of a club’s life in every sense. Jean-Michel Aulas: ‘a businessman in the world of football’ The chief spokesperson for the neo-liberal approach to football is the influential Jean-Michel Aulas, who took on the chairmanship of an indebted Olympique Lyonnais in 1987 when the club was going nowhere in Division 2. Two seasons later they were promoted as champions. In the meantime they have become financially the healthiest club in the league, a regular in European competitions, with the best overall record in the French league since the mid-1990s, and have finally won the Division 1 championship in 2002, thus fulfilling Aulas’s declared ambitions and expectations. On investing in the Brazilian striker Sonny Anderson in 1999 he announced his intentions of winning the championship within three years and to be one of the big names in Europe. His success in sporting terms has been equalled or bettered by his rising to the top of the leadership structures of professional clubs. He imposed himself on the LNF executive by his competence and the clarity and ambition of his views, becoming part of the executive committee, first as treasurer, then as first vice-president and kingmaker to the new puppet president Gérard Bourgoin in 2000, finally ousting the latter in April 2002 when he proved too much of a loose cannon. He is the real leader of the professional league, as well as being one of the key people in the UCPF, which he described as the ‘Club Chairmen’s Union’ (‘syndicat’) (Libération, 13 January 1991, cited in Faure and Suaud 1994b: 25). He also was crucial in the setting up of the Groupe Europe, a lobby group bringing together 12 French clubs that regularly play or have ambitions to play in Europe. He has become in his 15 years’ involvement in French professional football the key leader of the ‘modernisation’ movement, and the lightning conductor for attacks by all those opposed to the arrival of business values in sport, including Minister Buffet and ‘archaic’ representatives of small clubs and amateur clubs. Aulas has no background in football, but made his reputation and money through his very successful business career. Coming from an academic family in Lyon, he turned to business having studied economics and computing. He owns 34 per cent of a computing company he founded (CEGID), that has 1,400 employees and a turnover of a billion francs (£100 million). He played sport at a high level in his youth (Division 1 handball) until he suffered a back injury on the ski slopes. His company sponsored Alain Prost in Formula 1. Then a former OL chairman asked him to take over the club. Bernard Tapie helped in the process (Aulas had shares in Tapie holdings). He also took advice from Claude Bez, in whom he recognised ‘great qualities’. Rather like these two football businessmen, Aulas calls himself an entrepreneur, a risk taker; he needs to win. He is considered by many to be ambitious, authoritarian, able to take difficult decisions, a natural leader, but is thought cold in human relations, thriving on conflict and challenges, hard working (to the detriment of his family life), and able to keep a lot of different balls in the air at a time. Compared to the jovial Nicollin who can share a beer with his supporters clubs, Aulas is less expansive, and more ill at ease outside the boardroom in which he shines. There was a time when he was thought to have political ambitions regarding the Lyon Town Hall, but he is not a member of any political party (Ramsay 1999: 6–8). He has brought his business practices and his contacts to his involvement in club football. He is proud of having run OL on business lines without going into deficit, knows how much elimination in the preliminary round of the Champions League cost them in 1999 (40 million francs), and generally wants more control of the business he runs for OL, whether it be in taking over the management of the stadium or buying it from the city council or even building another, getting control over television rights for individual clubs, being able to raise money through being listed on the Bourse, or having a fairer taxation regime. He was able to bring into the club as biggest shareholder (34 per cent) the chairman of media group Pathé, Jérôme Seydoux (Barth 2000b). There is less discussion of decisions on the League representative body now he is one of the small executive group; he does not like wasting time because of administrative blockages that get in the way. In short, he operates as a ‘businessman in the world of football’ (Chassepot 2002). The demand for professional football to be run more like a business, to allow it to compete on equal terms with clubs from other countries, did not begin with Aulas, but he is now leading this debate with the French and European authorities, using consultants like Deloitte and Touche to bolster the arguments. As an elitist, he believes that without the inequalities that come with the creation of an elite, every club will stay small (Barth 2000b). His solutions are to remove any kind of sporting exception and to bring football into line with Europeanwide business law: ‘The only solution to the problem of finding money is the Bourse [the French Stock Exchange]. If Lyon was quoted on the Stock Exchange, that would allow the club to raise 45 million euros [£30 million], which would allow us to run a deficit of as much again’ (Rousseau 2002: 6). ‘As soon as I solve the problem of television rights and the Bourse, I can run a budget of 900 million francs [£90 million] within two years. We shall then be the equivalent of Juventus or Real Madrid’ (Chassepot 2002). Conclusion The 1980s saw a change in the values represented within football. The big clubs began trying to buy success by resorting to financial deficits, borrowing against future success, rather than by relying on long-term club and player development. The type of chairman that embodied this approach – Claude Bez or Bernard Tapie – was merely a more modern version of the traditional chairman, just as new forms of enterprise based on financial and other services were replacing traditional forms of manufacturing industry as the basis of the French economy. Small clubs who could not afford to adopt this approach – Faure and Suaud put their local club Nantes in this category – were forced to invest in longterm development and formation. They argue that these two approaches were due less to individuals than to a club’s structurally dominated position in the world of football. They had no choice but to incarnate a certain type of value, which, it so happens, can be portrayed as occupying the moral high ground. A club that relies on coaching and player development is seen as more respectable than one that goes for the quick fix. This division within club policies sets up a set of related value judgements. It corresponds to the traditional distinction between professional values and amateurism, between the importance of results and a desire to entertain, between win at all costs and the traditional Coubertinian sporting value of taking part being more important than winning (sport for sport’s sake). The devotion and altruism of the huge numbers of unpaid volunteers running amateur sport working for the good of the community were often contrasted to the practices of those club officials who had hit the headlines for apparently lining their own pockets through their involvement in professional football. From this moral high ground, legitimated by the ‘failures’ and the corruption of Bez, Tapie and others, those in positions of power within the Federation (elected in large measure by the grass-roots amateur game) have consistently opposed the desire of the big league clubs to operate in a more deregulated business environment as ordinary profit-making limited companies, which they have consistently condemned as threatening sport’s integrity. The long-term Chairman of the Federation, Claude Simonet, elected in 1994, having been a member of the DNCG from 1992, came from a club that relied on formation (he was vice-chairman of Nantes), and has always been a staunch defender of the community of interest between the amateur and the professional game and the contribution of the bénévoles (Faure and Suaud 1999: 31–34). The Federation was always supported in this approach at the highest level of government over the five years as Minister for Youth and Sport of Mme MarieGeorge Buffet, a key member of the Communist Party, itself indispensable to the left-wing coalition of the Jospin government of 1997–2002. Indeed Mme Buffet was an even stronger opponent of change than the FFF. The heavy defeat suffered by the left in the 2002 elections removed this ideological opposition to a more free-market approach. The defenders of amateur values and of the key involvement of the voluntary sector and of notions of public service in football have generally been able to maintain their influence in the institutions of governance of the Federation and until recently on the executive of the professional league. Faure and Suaud (1994b: 24) point out that there has been an objective alliance between the smaller professional clubs and representatives of the amateur leagues who are also attached to the status quo in a system that perpetuates their domination in footballing terms by other bigger clubs, but ensures the funding that allows them to survive. The push for change is coming from the self-styled Union of Professional Football Clubs, the big clubs that have already benefited from the investment of large amounts of private money (from media companies and sports management and sports equipment companies). The UCPF challenge the Federation’s version of the self-governance of football (which has been given added legal backing by Mme Buffet’s legislation). They point to rules that operate in society at large (and particularly in European Union law) but not in football, and reject the idea of sport’s exceptionalism. At the same time they claim that fully professional management is the best way to ensure the survival of French professional football as competitive in the new European-wide game. The big French clubs cannot ignore the Europeanisation of football, where the key rewards, both sporting and financial, are to be had. The traditional values of French football that survived throughout the twentieth century are under threat from what Faure and Suaud see as the next stage of the professionalisation of football. This ‘complete professionalisation’ can only happen through a breakaway of the top clubs from the Federation and therefore from the rest of football. Given the relationship of sport and the State in France, where the latter delegates responsibility for running sport as a public service to the sport’s federation, this split could only happen with political blessing. The 2002 elections will be seen as having been critical in this respect, as will the almost simultaneous debacle of the World Cup, which will be discussed in the final chapter.