Football is always more about big money but money has been at the center of debate for a long time.
There is one who perhaps knows it more than the others, he who had to make a crucial choice when his career had reached a complicated moment. Enzo Scifo was in fact on loan to Bordeaux for two years but things did not go as planned.
A complicated situation
“I was on loan to Bordeaux, a loan of 80 million Belgian francs for a two-season loan. It was a lot of money. With an amount like that we bought a player and I was on loan. But the second year the finances were not good in Bordeaux and we then decided not to continue so as not to pay for the second year I belonged to Inter then”, explains the former Devil to Philippe Vande Walle in the podcast. TOF Sport;
And Scifo continues: “One day, a journalist from L’Equipe called me saying: ‘Listen Enzo, we were asked not to do any more interviews with you but I don’t want to do one’. I didn’t understand, I didn’t know there were all these financial problems.”
“He made me want to play again”
“This journalist gave me the opportunity to do the interview and asked me if I would be ready to play for a French club. I told him yes but on one condition, that of playing in the European Cup. That was the least of all because I played in the European Cup every year,” he says.
The journalist replied at the time that only one club had only one foreigner while there could have been two, Auxerre: “I told him, if that’s it I’ll go straight away. Guy Roux then called me and asked me if it was true. I told him yes and he told me that if everyone made concessions, he would do anything to have me.
“Two days later, we found ourselves in a hotel in Orly with the leaders of Inter, those of Bordeaux, Guy Roux and the president of Auxerre, my father and my lawyer. We stayed for seventeen hours in a room, we couldn’t take it anymore. I finally decided to reduce my salary by three, it was the only solution to be able to play there,” adds Scifo.
And to conclude: “When I say that choices are important, that was one of the choices. For three or four years I started to earn a good living and that was also a goal. But I told myself that the The most important thing wasn’t that, I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t playing, I was training badly. Guy Roux was the trigger, he had the words, the way to integrate me. brought back the pleasure of playing and my career resumed.”
