FEATURE | ‘Everything must go’ Inside the financial crisis engulfing Marseille

FEATURE | ‘Everything must go’ Inside the financial crisis engulfing Marseille There is an “everything must go” feel to Marseille this summer. A new president, sporting director, and coach have arrived at the Vélodrome, tasked with rebuilding from the ruins of a sporting project that collapsed spectacularly last season. Yet years of short-term thinking, financial gambling, and relentless squad turnover have left Les Olympiens short of financial room for manoeuvre this summer. With the 2026-2027 season on the horizon, it is only now that the club is reckoning with the consequences. And as the new regime began taking stock, the message behind the scenes was strikingly simple: everyone was for sale. GFFN understood at the beginning of the summer transfer window Marseille’s new hierarchy were prepared to listen to offers for virtually every member of the first-team squad. Even players who are considered as central to the club’s plans could leave if the right offer arrives.  Mason Greenwood’s €39 million departure to Fernabahçe was the first movement to be completed, before Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang followed out the door with a move to Deportivo La Corunna . Local boy Bilal Nadir was allowed to leave on a free transfer, before a deal was agreed with Manchester City for number one keeper Gerónimo Rulli. According to L’Équipe , another deal has been agreed with Bayer Leverkusen for the sale of defender Facundo Medina. Marseille have also reached an agreement to sell Nayef Aguerd to Real Sociedad. Even over the course of writing this article, Newcastle have made captain Pierre-Emile Højbjerg a target, Coventry have made enquiries for English midfielder Angel Gomes , and Como are interested in Amine Gouiri . Sources contacted by GFFN also confirm that English clubs are still interested in CJ Egan-Riley, who could move for as much €10m.  ‘We knew nothing’ The sales are, however, only the symptom of a deeper issue which runs to the heart of the club’s governance and leadership by US billionaire Frank McCourt. On the 17th June, UEFA confirmed that Marseille had failed to meet the final target of the settlement agreement signed with European football’s governing body in 2022. OM were fined €10m, restricted in their ability to register new players for European competition this season and, most significantly, handed a suspended exclusion from UEFA competition.  Should Marseille fail to meet the required financial target during the 2026/27 season, the next European competition for which they qualify within the following three seasons will be played without them. UEFA also confirmed that OM had breached its squad-cost rule, with spending on the playing squad exceeding the permitted 70% ratio in 2025. What makes Marseille’s position all the more remarkable is that this is not a club that has lacked investment. According to investigative journalist Romain Molina, Frank McCourt has injected more than €700m into OM since purchasing the club in 2016, repeatedly covering enormous structural losses. In some seasons, the American was required to contribute close to €100m simply to plug the gap. That willingness has now reached its limit. Molina reported earlier this year that McCourt had privately made clear that he no longer wanted to continue “signing cheques” to absorb Marseille’s losses, while attempts to attract a minority investor had so far failed to produce a solution. The extent of that disconnect was laid bare by former director of football Medhi Benatia this week. Speaking to France Football , Benatia said he only became aware of the seriousness of Marseille’s financial position during a meeting with McCourt and Longoria in Kuwait in January. “At that point, I understood that we had to sell,” Benatia recalled. After questioning why the sporting department had not been made aware of the change in circumstances, he said: “He realised that I didn’t know, and I realised that, with De Zerbi, we knew nothing.” Benatia described the meeting as a breaking point. “I was fighting and discovering the finances at the same time. I felt betrayed.” Benatia also rejected the idea that the current financial situation could simply be blamed on the final sporting regime during the 2025-2026 season, pointing out that OM were already under DNCG restrictions when he arrived and that the club’s enormous transfer churn predated him. “The 35 transfer movements per transfer window existed before I arrived,” he said. McCourt had essentially deferred the day to day running of the club to former president Pablo Longoria, whose six-year association with Marseille came to an acrimonious end in March.  Pablo Longoria’s legacy His departure came only weeks after the collapse of the Roberto De Zerbi project and the wider restructuring of OM’s sporting hierarchy. Yet the reasons behind the collapse of confidence between him and McCourt are symptomatic of the wider problem in Marseille. The Spaniard oversaw an extraordinary level of transfer activity during his time at the club, with 2-3 cycles of complete squad rebuilds totalling at around 259 transfer movements, according to Transfermarkt. Romain Molina made a series of serious allegations concerning the way certain transfers and mandates were handled during Longoria’s presidency. Among the most striking concerns is Geoffrey Kondogbia’s move from Atlético Madrid in 2023. Molina alleges that Marseille initially had an agreement to sign the midfielder for €8m, before the structure of the deal changed in order to involve Spanish agent Eugenio Botas, a long-standing associate of Longoria. According to Molina, Atlético ultimately received €9m, with the additional money allowing Botas to obtain a mandate on the Spanish club’s side of the transaction and receive a commission. Molina has also questioned Botas’ role in Marseille’s attempts to sell Mason Greenwood. He reports that the agent had previously been given a mandate which could have entitled him to 10% of a potential transfer to Atlético Madrid. He also reports that Longoria ultimately received more than €1m as part of the agreement surrounding his departure from OM, despite the increasingly strained relationship between the former president and McCourt during the final months of his tenure. Ultimately, Longoria was working under an owner who continued to significantly fund Marseille whilst remaining largely removed from the club’s day-to-day decision-making. That distance left McCourt reliant on a shifting circle of advisors, consultants, and external agencies. The downside is not necessarily the money being put into the club, but the lack of oversight over how it was being spent. That pattern has continued even since Longoria’s departure and the nomination of Stéphan Richard as president.  Who is advising owner Frank McCourt? According to Molina , McCourt enlisted Excel Sports to assist with the search for a new sporting director, with the agency producing a shortlist which included Paul Mitchell, Florian Maurice, Julien Fournier and eventual appointment Grégory Lorenzi. The irony was difficult to miss: OM had paid an external company to identify a group of executives already well established within French football. Lorenzi’s arrival has not brought an end to the use of outside intermediaries either. La Provence reported this week that an external agency had been mandated to help Marseille generate offers for players and accelerate sales this summer. Several sources told the newspaper that the instruction came directly from McCourt, something OM formally denied. Molina has separately reported that Unique Sports has been brought into the process of facilitating departures. That creates an unusual situation in which Lorenzi is attempting to rebuild the squad while external actors are simultaneously being tasked with helping dismantle it. That decision has also reportedly taken players and their agents by surprise, with Unique Sports taking commission off every transfer of the club whether they have or not been involved in the deal. The use of money around the club has not only concerned football operations. McCourt has long relied upon Image 7 , an influential communications and lobbying agency headed by Anne Méaux, as one of his principal sources of advice in France.  The company’s role has stretched well beyond conventional public relations. L’Équipe reported recently that Image 7 had dedicated resources to lobbying French parliamentarians over the reform of professional football governance, a cause strongly supported by McCourt and his entourage. Molina has also alleged that McCourt’s entourage used a British communications company as part of a strategy which included placing negative stories concerning Lyon in the English media. The allegation is particularly striking given the unusual access afforded to The Telegraph during the latter stages of the Longoria era. Both Longoria and Roberto De Zerbi gave extensive interviews to the newspaper, while in May the outlet published an exclusive report claiming Lyon faced potential UEFA sanctions over alleged failures to comply with financial obligations. OL publicly rejected the substance of that report, describing it as “one-sided”. There is, however, no evidence establishing that The Telegraph article was commissioned by Marseille or that the newspaper was aware of any wider communications strategy.  The episode is another example of the unusual ecosystem that developed around McCourt: significant sums being spent not only on players and agents, but also on advisers, external agencies and communications battles far removed from what happened on the pitch. There are smaller examples too. GFFN understands that concerns have been raised internally over spending away from the sporting operation. In one instance, a senior club employee declined the use of a vehicle made available by OM and instead accumulated a substantial expenses bill through private transport paid for by the club. There are other curious remnants of the previous regime still to be resolved. Ali Zarrak was one of Medhi Benatia’s closest collaborators within the sporting department, but still remains employed by Marseille despite being moved away from the club’s headquarters. Zarrak is expected to relocate to the Paris region and take responsibility for scouting in Île-de-France, effectively removing him from the daily environment at La Commanderie without ending his association with OM altogether. Meanwhile GFFN understands that sporting coordinator Bob Tahri, another figure closely associated with Benatia, is set to leave the club. Tahri was notably on the receiving end of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s overzealous use of a fire extinguisher during an extraordinary squad lockdown at the Commanderie last season. Patience in Marseille New manager Bruno Génésio arrived without the fanfare which accompanied Roberto De Zerbi two years earlier, but the former Lyon and Lille coach is generally well regarded by those around the club. There is also little sense that he was sold a false picture of the circumstances awaiting him in Marseille. Génésio has spoken openly about the restrictions facing OM and, crucially, appears to have accepted that the squad he began pre-season with may look considerably different by the end of August. GFFN was present at La Commanderie in late July as Génésio addressed that reality directly. Asked about the possibility of losing further important players, the Marseille coach separated his own sporting wishes from the financial requirements imposed upon the club. “When you are a coach, there are two aspects,” Génésio explained. “The sporting aspect: obviously, when you have good players, you want to keep them. Then there is the second aspect, the financial aspect. That is not my domain, it is the domain of my president and Greg Lorenzi. We know the constraints fixed by the DNCG. I came here fully aware of the situation. I know things can move.” It was a notably sober assessment for a club where summers have so often been accompanied by declarations of renewed ambition. Génésio would naturally prefer to preserve an experienced spine to his team, but Marseille no longer have the luxury of treating sporting continuity as the only consideration. “I think it is important to keep stability on a sporting level,” he added, stressing the value of players who already understand the club, Ligue 1 and the particular pressures of Marseille. “But you have to know how to be patient. It is a balance that has to be found.” That has been the image of Bruno Génésio throughout the pre-season. He is an experienced manager that has seemingly earned the respect of his players and the club and hasn’t attempted to disguise the circumstances in which he is working.  Patience has become the key word. For supporters watching some of their best players leave, for a manager attempting to construct a competitive team from an ever-changing squad, and for a sporting director whose reputation was built on extracting maximum value from limited resources, the coming weeks will demand plenty of it. GFFN | George Boxall – Reporting from Marseille.