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With Wednesday night’s victory in the Conference League final against Fiorentina, Olympiacos became the first Greek football team to win an international trophy. The Conference League is the third most important European competition, but it is still a remarkable achievement considering the history of Greek teams in Europe. Olympiacos is a multi-sport club and in football it is clearly the most successful team in Greece, having won 47 championships (the second, Panathinaikos, has won 20). Since 2010, the owner of the club is the Greek entrepreneur and shipowner Evangelos Marinakis, one of the richest men in Greece, who since 2017 also owns the English team Nottingham Forest.
With Marinakis, Olympiacos has won ten of the last fourteen Greek championships, while Nottingham Forest (historic team that won two consecutive European Cups in 1979 and 1980, the forerunner of the Champions League) returned to the Premier League for the first time after 23 years. The sporting results have certainly been positive and Marinakis is very popular especially among Olympiacos fans, a team of which he himself is a fan. At the same time, however, he is also a quite controversial character, whose name has been associated with several scandals over the years.
Evangelos Marinakis’ main source of wealth is ships. Born in 1967 in Crete, when he was little he moved with his family to Piraeus, the municipality a few kilometers from Athens where the port is built, one of the main in Europe and in the world for passenger and goods traffic. His father Miltiadis Marinakis owned a foundry that made bells and above all a shipping company, which today is called Capital Maritime & Trading Corp and which was inherited and expanded by Evangelos. As the sports site wrote The Athletic in a long story article about the president of Olympiacos, when Miltiadis died in 1999, he owned eight ships: today the company has just under one hundred ships, making up one of the largest fleets of cargo ships in the world.
Evangelos Marinakis at the end of a Nottingham Forest match (Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
In addition to the ships, Marinakis owns several media outlets, which over the years have helped him control his public image, which he seems to care a lot about. He is a shareholder of Alter Ego, which owns the Mega TV television channel, one of the most popular in Greece. He also owns newspapers, magazines and news sites. When he bought Nottingham Forest in 2017 it appears he tried to buy two British newspapers, the Guardian and the Nottingham Post, but in the end nothing came of it. There Gazzetta dello Sport he recently defined Marinakis as “the Greek Berlusconi”, due to the similarities between their careers and their interests: football, the media and also political commitment. In the United States he has been defined as “the Trump of Piraeus”.
In fact, in 2014 he was elected municipal councilor in Piraeus, as an independent: despite the not particularly relevant position, Marinakis immediately assumed great power in the city, contributing to various social projects such as the construction of playgrounds, soup kitchens, the restoration of squares and main meeting places. He also decorated the streets with statues of Greek heroes. His father, Miltiadis Marinakis, was also involved in politics: he was a Greek parliamentarian with the conservative center-right New Democracy party.
Evangelos’ political orientation, however, is more nuanced: during the elections, his opponents accused him of having relations with the far-right Golden Dawn party (Marinakis denied this) and in general his career and his interests as an entrepreneur make him closer to center-right area. On the other hand, however, Marinakis established a sort of welcoming committee for migrants arriving from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries at Piraeus, the main Greek port of disembarkation. «The tattoo on my left arm with the writing Dream, love, create, fight, survive, win is indicative of how he wants to be seen: a competitive businessman with an empathetic side,” he writes The Athletic. Marinakis is someone who has always done a lot of charity: some consider him a philanthropist, others just a very rich person who wants to clean up his image through these gestures.
The purchase of Olympiacos was a question of image for Marinakis, but also of support and family. His father was in fact a shareholder of the sports club for years, in which he had various roles (first in the water polo part, then in the football part). In recent years Evangelos Marinakis has invested a lot of money in Olympiacos and then in Nottingham Forest, behaving a bit like the president-entrepreneurs of an era now essentially over in football, who spend a lot, try to buy the best players, change a lot coaches. When the team loses, Marinakis often attends the next practice.
In short, in managing the teams he wants to show that he is very present: he often goes to the stadium, both in Greece and in England, and follows the matches with great enthusiasm. Also for this reason, as well as for his sporting successes, the majority of Olympiacos fans appreciate and support him. In 2015 he violated a fairly well-established protocol by going to the stadium of city rivals Panathinaikos to watch the match (which has been forbidden to visiting fans for twenty years now to avoid clashes and disorder).
In his fourteen-year presidency, Marinakis also brought high-level players to Olympiacos, such as former Real Madrid full-back Marcelo (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)
Another reason why Evaneglos Marinakis has been compared to Berlusconi is the large number of judicial matters that concerned him without his ever being indicted. Over the years, Marinakis has been accused of having fixed the results of some matches, of having bribed and threatened referees and of having participated in the smuggling of heroin through his ships.
In 2012 a bomb exploded in the bakery of referee Petro Konstantineas, who said he had rejected an attempt to bribe him to favor Olympiacos in a match: Marinakis was accused of having played a role in that attack, but no one was found link. The year before, in 2011, Marinakis was reported by Panathinaikos striker Djibril Cissé for slander, insults and threats, after an argument the two had at the end of a match between Panathinaikos and Olympiacos (he was eventually acquitted). In 2015, before he even got to trial, the accusations against him of having contributed to combining the results of some second division and Greek Cup matches between 2009 and 2010 were set aside, for which there was an anomalous flow of bets.
The biggest case outside of football that concerned him was that relating to his alleged participation in drug trafficking. An investigation entitled The Vampire Ship claimed that Marinakis was involved in a gigantic international heroin trafficking and his name also appeared among the sixty-eight people suspected by the Greek judicial authorities. Even in that case, however, in the end he did not suffer any legal consequences. In all these controversies, Marinakis has always declared himself innocent and has accused judges and unspecified “political enemies” of trying to hinder his career.
2024-05-30 11:20:27
#History #controversies #Olympiacos #president #Evangelos #Marinakis
