Olympique de Marseille is not a team like the others. With its nine French championship titles and its 125 years of existence, the Marseille club has been a major player in the history of the French championship for decades. And even on the European level where it remains, at present, the only French club to have lifted the Champions League, in 1993.
Suffice to say that there are many stories to tell. Fabrice Lamperti, journalist at Provencededicated a book to it, entitled The 50 best OM playersIn it, he looks back at the careers of 50 personalities from the Olympian club, from the pioneers to the most recent players.
When you look at the history of OM, choosing 50 players was inevitably complicated…
“To be precise, it’s 48 players because it seemed important to us to highlight two managers: Bernard Tapie and Raymond Goethals. That further limits the field of possibilities. OM is a club founded in 1899, which has a fairly rich history. It has won titles almost all the time, there have been many great players. Having spoken about it with colleagues, there are around thirty essential players and others where we can no longer debate their presence. We must take into account the longevity of each player, the mark they have left, the titles they have won. There are quite a few factors.”
You must have chosen players from all decades…
“We had to mix the eras. There are players from the 1930s, the first glorious ambassadors like Jean Boyer, up to today so that it can speak to the younger ones, like Dimitri Payet. It was important to mix the eras. It’s a bit of a duty of remembrance for all those who don’t know the older ones.”
Have you discovered the story of some players?
“I learned more, yes, because there are four pages on each one. For some, it’s not very complicated to write like Didier Deschamps, Mathieu Valbuena, Dimitri Payet or Steve Mandanda. But for a Jean Boyer, a Larbi Ben Barek or the players of the 40s, it was more so. It required real research work in the archives to try to make a portrait that holds up, because there are no more witnesses from that time. Especially since the interest is not to tell only the sporting side, it’s also to tell stories. I wanted to tell the story of the footballer but beyond that, the man.”
There are bound to be some incredible journeys…
“I think of Vasconcellos, a Brazilian goalkeeper in the late 1930s. He was a docker in the port of Rio, he carried 50 kg sacks of rice with one hand, and he was a pretty incredible public entertainer on the pitch. He died in a street fight in Brazil and was buried in a mass grave. He had an incredible life, he’s almost a character from a novel. We also have Joseph, a Cameroonian striker who came to France to follow in the footsteps of his father and brother who worked on the railways. He played in a small local club and scored four goals against the OM reserve team. He was spotted and little by little, he made a name for himself until he scored more than 100 goals with Marseille.”
Do you have any regrets about certain choices?
“We could have gone to sixty names without any problem but we can’t put them all. Everyone has their own sensitivity to the exploits of others. I attended the 2010 title, the last conquests of OM under Didier Deschamps. I have a particular fondness for Lucho Gonzalez, some wouldn’t have put him. It can spark debates and criticism. I could have put André-Pierre Gignac, Klaus Allofs, Enzo Francescoli or others…”
Fabrice Lamperti, “The 50 best OM players”, Éditions Scotty, 2024, 233 pages, €22.
Mathieu Valbuena, a divisive player in Marseille
If he signs the preface, Mathieu Valbuena is also one of the 48 players presented in this book. “He is a character who left a very different mark depending on the witnesses. The youngest do not understand. For them it is Lyon, the return to the Vélodrome under the boos with the puppet in the stands, hanging from the gallows… While the old ones have a real admiration, respect for him”, explains Fabrice Lamberti.
For him, there was no debate about Valbuena’s presence in his book: “He is the fifth OM player with the most matches. He arrived from nowhere, from Libourne-Saint-Seurin for 80,000 euros at the time (in 2006). He became an international, he is one of the main architects of all OM’s latest conquests under Didier Deschamps. For all that, it seemed important to me to highlight him. His presence is not up for debate and Mario Albano (former journalist who gives his opinion on each player in the book) says it in the comments. We will realize later all that he brought to OM. Right now, we don’t have enough perspective to appreciate all that. He is the man of exceptional goals. He is a whole part of OM’s history.”
