Financial drift, sporting disaster, impotence of the political world, one of the old strongholds of French football has continued to sink since the sale of the club by M6 in 2018. This is the subject of a fascinating book on the behind the scenes of this shipwreck. Its two authors are in Dimanche en Politique.
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Financial mismanagement, XXL salaries, inertia and impotence of the local political Landerneau, crash of football business, Bordeaux continues to fall. At the start of the week, around a hundred club employees received their dismissal letters. An essential step since the abandonment last summer of professional status and which marks the end of a long history of 140 years.
On October 29, the 2009 French champion will play an important match before the commercial court, three months before the end of the judicial recovery period at the end of January. One more step in the long descent into hell of a club six times champion of France, four times winner of the French Cup and finalist of the UEFA Cup (the ancestor of the Europa League) in 1996.
In six years, from the sale to investment funds and until the takeover by Gérard Lopez, the Girondins went from the top of the Ligue 1 table to the amateur world of N2. An XXL shipwreck dissected in a book by two Bordeaux journalists, Nicolas Paolorsi from RMC and Vincent Romain from Sud-Ouest.
“Bordeaux is one of the most successful clubs in French football which was still French champion in 2009, which reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League in 2010. It’s not that far away, estimates the RMC correspondent in Bordeaux. It was fourteen years ago. It is a club which has had other champion titles, which has had many international players and some of the greatest French players like Giresse or Zidane. The descent into hell was rapid, in six years.”
“We criticized King Street after the takeover from M6, but we are talking about one of the largest investment funds in the world with a solid reputation.”, believes Vincent Romain.
It took them a while to understand that their then associate Jo DaGrosa via GACP had cheated them.
Vincent Romain
Journalist
“It’s an environment that King Street did not know and for them, it was an investment like any other. Today, Bordeaux is a financial pit. The club is in receivership, there is the social plan to finance by Gérard Lopez. There is always a sword of Damocles above the heads of the Girondins.
Astronomical salaries of players, coaches, multiple casting errors, extravagant expenses at the expense of the club, inertia or impotence of the political world, The Girondins are a shipwreck. Today, the club survives largely thanks to the Metropolis. The community voted for a deliberation in September which allows the club not to pay, again this season, the rent of the Matmut Atlantique stadium where the first team plays its N 2 matches. The club, which already owed twenty million euros of unpaid rent to the Metropolis and which will probably never be reimbursed, is on life support.
