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Fifa on Saturday banned Olympique de Marseille from recruiting for a year, amid a dispute over Senegalese midfielder Pape Gueye with English club Watford.
The consequences are heavy for Olympique de Marseille, which was banned from recruiting for a year by Fifa as part of the transfer of Senegalese midfielder Pape Gueye on Saturday January 15.
OM announced in a press release that they were going to appeal. Pape Gueye will also challenge the decision of the international body.
“The club and its player intend to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport so that both the merits of their positions and the absence of any reproaches which could have been wrongly attributed to them are recognized”, writes OM in his press release.
“Pending a final decision, a request for suspension of all sporting sanctions has been filed in order to preserve their interests,” added the club. This means that OM and Gueye have already requested a suspensive effect of the sanction imposed by the FIFA Dispute Resolution Chamber.
This decision provides for OM a recruitment ban of 12 months, as well as a fine of just over two million euros. The player, currently at the CAN with Senegal, has for his part been suspended for four months from all official competitions.
Unilateral termination
The procedure had been opened in February 2021 by Watford, with which Gueye had agreed before withdrawing and joining the French club in the summer of 2020.
Trained in Le Havre, the player had signed a pre-contract with Watford. At the end of April 2020, the English club even announced his signing for five years, from the following July 1.
But Gueye, selected for the French youth teams before opting in October 2021 for Senegal, the country of origin of his parents, had in the meantime terminated this contract unilaterally for formal defects.
OM, then chaired by Jacques-Henri Eyraud, took advantage of the opportunity despite the risk of litigation, materialized a few months later by the appeal filed last February by Watford before Fifa.
According to a source with knowledge of the file consulted by AFP, Fifa would have estimated that OM had played a role in the breach of the contract between Watford and Gueye, which the Provençal club, which considers to have solid arguments to defend its future appeal, dispute.
With AFP
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