Marseille is a city divided, wounded and proud of its contradictions, which often settles scores in the streets or in the courts, but which, above all, resolves its doubts in a huge centrifuge of emotions. The Vélodrome, Olympique’s stadium (second in the table), the football venue with the largest capacity and the first to be built in cement in the country, functions every two weeks as a purgatory where all the souls of one of the most particular cities in France. Right at the entrance, a statue will soon rise of a complex and beloved character who was born and died in Paris, but decided to be buried in the city that made him what he ended up being, which was no small thing.
Bernard Tapie, whose life is now recreated in a Netflix miniseries, was one of those old presidents of a dying football driven by one of those internal engines that work on shortcuts and hunches. Maybe it’s not necessary, but there are almost no characters of this type left in modern sport, colonized by investment funds, marketing and artificial intelligence. Not even in the OM itself, whose current president, the Spanish Pablo Longoria, a 38-year-old man forged between data, study and statistics, could it be said that the opposite is true.
The old boss of the OM, who died in 2021 due to cancer, was a hustler, a suburban adventurer born into a working-class family in the north of the country – his father was a milling lathe operator and his mother was a housewife – capable of doing what he wanted. out to fly like a comet. And whatever it was, as we saw later, it was literally that, a fall narrated as an absurd epilogue to a match played on May 20, 1993 between Olympic Marseille and Valenciennes, whose result he tried to rig just so that his players , who would play the European Cup final against Milan six days later, could face the match with the League already won. He paid for it with 165 days in jail and his final discredit. Until then it was a meteorite.
Tapie, handsome, always tanned and somewhat mouthy, was a sort of Berlusconi in rose water. But he gave off a kind air or an inclination toward a certain progressivism or social sensitivity that made him a rare bird in the panorama of tycoons. And his time in politics, instead of exploring the right margins of Parliament as his kind did to get along with money, he settled on the left of François Mitterrand, who made him a minister and a flag against the extreme right of Jean Marie LePen.
Tapie did everything. He tried his luck as an actor, as a singer, as a pilot, he sold televisions, set up a health care company (a huge trilerada) and specialized in buying companies on the verge of bankruptcy for a symbolic franc to revive them and then sell them for a fortune. Adidas did something similar when the German brand was at its worst, overshadowed by giants like Reebook or Nike. The greatest of his works, however, was that OM, created with talents such as Desailly, Papin, Barthez, Deschamps, Angloma, Rudi Voller. Tapie didn’t study. Or not alone. He intuited and seduced. An anti-system way of managing – and of being – that perhaps today would only be represented by endangered creatures like Joan Laporta, and whose fate, and that of the fans, continues to depend on matters as poetic as good taste, heart and a constellation of coincidences.
