Football: Mood: in 2137, we will always talk about refereeing at FC Sion!

This is so because it clearly cannot be otherwise: from the moment we talk about FC Sion, the burning question of arbitration – and the special treatment of which the Valais club considers itself the victim – always ends up inexorably resurfacing, sometimes much more quickly than one might expect.

If Sion so often finds himself in the crosshairs, in the sights of the referees, it is very probably also (especially?) because its president, carried away by his emotions, knows how to blow on the embers like no other. When it comes to defending his club, Christian Constantin, ready for all legal offensives, including the most useless, has no limits. Faced with the feeling of injustice that he abhors, the boss of Tourbillon likes nothing less than to fight, even if it sometimes means falling into blindness.

For more than a quarter of a century, we have no longer counted the crusades waged againstestablishment, with two recurring favorite themes: the supposed incompetence of the leaders of the Swiss Football League and the supposedly low quality of Swiss arbitration, in which he is not necessarily wrong. Battles that he feels obliged to lead at full speed, often lost in advance, but that doesn’t matter.

Added to her angry reactions, CC’s tenacity in wanting to obtain compensation is certainly impressive, but we understand that it could annoy others. If his players had always deployed as much energy on the field as their boss spends to lead his battles sometimes even in court, Sion would certainly have already won the championship title.

However, let us recognize here that the Valaisans’ season, since their relegation to the Challenge League, has been going rather well in this area, the Tourbillon club having hardly had the opportunity, until now, to (too much) complain overall about the arbitral body against him. We certainly have memories here and there of certain scabrous decisions, perhaps even having influenced the course of a match, but probably no more than elsewhere. There was even the episode of a particularly generous penalty that Didier Tholot’s players would certainly not have obtained with the presence of VAR, if they were still playing (or again, it depends) in Super League.

While the absence of VAR had shocked no one in the quarter-final against Young Boys, this weekend it took the contentious scene of the 50th minute and this scandalous penalty offered to Lugano (in an ideal world, more just, Doumbia should have been warned for simulation…) so that years of controversies instantly resurface. In a fraction of a second, everything disappeared – the extraordinary atmosphere, the more than 15,000 spectators present, the excellent start to the Valais match, etc. –, then nothing mattered except this damn penalty.

In the wake of some tasty verbal slip-ups of which he has the secret, Christian Constantin was even immediately going to ask to be able to replay the semi-final on the pretext of unequal treatment (with the presence of the VAR at the Schützenwiese and not at Tourbillon) , a request he addressed to Swiss Sport Integrity, the body responsible for uncovering ethics violations at Swiss Olympic. Without letting himself be put off in any way, he even took the opportunity to already propose a date, set for the end of May, a few days before the final, Blick told us.

In the end, it all doesn’t amount to much. The worry is to think that this permanent circus risks starting again next season if Sion returns to the Super League as it has taken the path.

By multiplying all-out offensives, CC is undoubtedly doing more harm to his club than if he chose his fights better. Because we remain quite convinced that the referees, unconsciously, without having given themselves the word, actually end up making the boss of FC Sion pay the price for his repeated excesses. By wallowing too much in victimhood, isn’t the one who supports his club with all the passion that characterizes him doing a disservice to the cause he intends to defend? We are always more certain of it.

All this ends up inexorably rubbing off on the Valais supporters, screaming scandal because they are in turn convinced of the (always very practical) theory of conspiracy, that an entire canton strives to bring out after each gross error. At this rate, in 2137, we will still be talking about refereeing at FC Sion!

Rather than wasting their energy on sterile controversies, the Tourbillon club and its president would do better in our opinion to focus on the truth on the ground and what is happening there, whether for good or bad.