OM’s excellent start to the season has put to rest rumours of Frank McCourt being sold to Saudi Arabia. But there is no shortage of negotiations surrounding the club and several businessmen are gravitating around Marseille.
In recent months, incessant rumors about a potential takeover of Olympique de Marseille by Saudi Arabia have flourished. For some specialists who talk about this subject almost every day, this sale is without doubt and will be made official sooner or later. The supporters, for their part, prefer to note that their club is on the right track sportingly thanks to the investments of Frank McCourt, who put his hand in his wallet this summer to offer a competitive team to his new coach Roberto De Zerbi. Saudi Arabia seems to be slowly moving away, which does not mean that wealthy businessmen do not gravitate around the Olympian club with perhaps in a corner of their mind the idea of taking Frank McCourt’s place in the long term.
The Live Foot website does not fail to point out that a famous French billionaire has approached Olympique de Marseille in recent days in the person of Xavier Niel, boss of Free, who has signed a partnership with the Marseille club. But where things get interesting is when we learn that Xavier Niel and a certain Rodolphe Saadé have joined forces (and their money) in a joint project around artificial intelligence (Kyutai), at the end of 2023. OM fans are not unaware that Rodolphe Saadé is a very rich Marseille businessman whose company CMA CGM is the number 1 sponsor of Olympique de Marseille.
Rodolphe Saadé and Xavier Niel gravitate around OM
Saadé and Niel are therefore very serious partners in the non-football business and as luck would have it, Niel became a few months later a sponsor of Olympique de Marseille and this is anything but a coincidence for the media. “OM is another step for this billionaire with delusions of grandeur. To the point of seeing it as a possible buyer of the club? Rodolphe Saadé, a local, forbids himself from going there alone, scalded by the fate of Bernard Tapie. But well accompanied, why not” underlines the media, for whom this association could eventually become a threat to Frank McCourt, although they are officially allies since they are official sponsors to date. The American boss of OM will have to remain cautious in any case, he who has never publicly opened the door to a sale of his club since its purchase from Margarita Louis-Dreyfus in 2016.
