OM pulled off one of the biggest moves of the transfer window 15 days after the transfer window closed by announcing an agreement in principle on Sunday with French international Adrien Rabiot, who will arrive on a free transfer after leaving Juventus Turin this summer.
With Rabiot, OM is preparing to welcome a very high-level midfielder, a regular in the French team during the last Euro as he was at Juventus, where he played for five years.
Incidentally, Marseille is thumbing its nose at its old rival, Paris SG, where “Le Duc” was trained and where he won six French championship titles before a bitter end to the adventure, concluded by six months of sidelining.
“Olympique de Marseille announces that it has reached an agreement in principle with Adrien Rabiot for the arrival of the French international midfielder at the club. The player will sign with OM subject to the results of the medical examination,” the Marseille club announced in a brief press release on Sunday evening.
A club spokeswoman later told AFP that the player was expected in Provence on Monday. The medical examinations could take place between Monday and Tuesday.
– OM remains attractive –
According to another source with knowledge of the discussions, Rabiot, 29, is expected to commit for two seasons at the cost of “significant financial sacrifices”. According to the Italian press, he was earning a net salary of seven million euros per year in Turin.
If his medical examination is validated, Rabiot will be a choice recruit for OM, who have embarked on a three-year project embodied by their new coach, Roberto De Zerbi.
With 48 selections in the French team, with which he was vice-world champion in 2022, and 60 Champions League matches, he would bring quality and experience to the Marseille midfield, already solid with the Dane Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg and the Central African Geoffrey Kondogbia.
His arrival also confirms that despite a last season ending in a pitiful 8th place and despite a season without a European Cup for the first time since 2019-20, OM remains attractive.
A first signal of this was given this summer with the signing of the Italian coach Roberto De Zerbi, highly regarded on the coaching market and who, like Rabiot, was followed by more prestigious clubs than OM.
– “Normal to dream” –
With the arrival of De Zerbi and a solid and ambitious transfer window also symbolised by the arrivals of Mason Greenwood and Elye Wahi, Marseille president Pablo Longoria has launched a new three-year project, a perspective that would have seemed fanciful in the middle of last season when OM was in the midst of a storm and some of the supporters were demanding the departure of the Spanish manager.
But the wind is changing quickly at Marseille, a historically unstable club, and even before the surprise announcement of Rabiot’s arrival, some supporters were beginning to dream of the title in view of a successful start to the season with 10 points taken in four matches.
“It’s normal for the fans to dream,” De Zerbi said on Saturday after his team’s 2-0 win over Nice. “But there’s reality. We’ve changed a lot this summer, we still have a lot of room for improvement. So we have to focus on that. But the fans have to dream. I don’t know where we’ll get to, but me, the players, the president, the staff, we have to have ambitions. Time will tell where they can take us,” the Italian added.
Now, these ambitions are logically fueled by the signing of a reinforcement of the calibre of Rabiot who, for his part, should quickly return to the Blues after missing the last gathering of the French team at the beginning of the month.
“Adrien is in a bit of a sticky situation. He has been approached by several teams but has not yet decided. Without having a team and without training… I hope he will quickly choose a situation that can bring him back with us,” declared Didier Deschamps. The choice is now made.
lh-eba-stt/hpa
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