Appointed last week, the new president of Olympique de Marseille Stéphane Richard has a precise idea of how he wants to proceed at the club, when he is officially in office from July 2. Its key word: stability.
For his first media intervention since his presentation, this Tuesday morning at the microphone of RTL, the new strong man of OM expressed his eagerness to “be able to write a new page” in the history of the club. A page that he hopes is less messy than under the presidency of Pablo Longoria, whose method he scratched without naming him.
The file of the future sports director
“There has been too much instability in this club in recent years, between the coaches and the squad itself,” he noted. Football is still a team sport (…), it’s still very complicated to get a team to play well when you have a third or half of the squad changing every year. It’s even impossible. I think the first thing this club needs is a certain stability. But, that doesn’t mean there won’t be changes, of course. »
The priority short-term objective, according to him, is qualification for the Champions League next season by finishing in 3rd place in the championship. And then, OM has “absolutely everything to be one of the 20 best European clubs in the medium term”, he added.
Asked in passing about Bernard Tapie, Stéphane Richard also wanted to distance himself from the style of the former club boss.
To achieve his goals, however, Richard will have to go through a recovery of OM’s finances, which posted net losses of 105 million euros at the end of last season. “The more difficulties we have to manage, the greater the pressure, the more calm we must be,” he asserted. I think there are a lot of difficulties ahead of me and the club, that’s for sure. But, they must be taken in a calm, thoughtful and methodical manner. »
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In the meantime, the future president will be involved in another hot issue: the recruitment of a new sports director, to take over from Mehdi Benatia from the summer. The Team in today’s edition the names of Grégory Lorenzi (Brest) and Julien Fournier (ex-Nice) are mentioned. But nothing has been done yet, far from it.
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