Ligue 1 fans have not forgotten William Vainqueur. Having played for FC Nantes, OM and Toulouse FC, the defensive midfielder is now retired but has come out to deliver an enlightening testimony on one of the biggest cases of child abuse in the history of French football.
Without really knowing it, Vainqueur was linked to it at a younger age through the recruiter of FC Nantes, Ahmed Gueninèche, sentenced to 18 years of criminal imprisonment for rape and sexual assault on a minor in 2022. If the 35-year-old player passed between the drops at the time, he discovered with fear the true nature of the man he considered his mentor.
Vainqueur testified at trial
“When she (the commissioner) revealed everything to me, I was taken aback, it was a real shock,” he said in L’Équipe? She was the one who explained to me that he used to use my name to achieve his ends with children. I was so far from suspecting all of this. My first daughter, when she was born, I put her in Ahmed’s arms…” In fact, Gueninèche used Gueninèche to serve as a Winner, a professional after having been unearthed by him, to lure his victims in search of glory in the world of football.
A data which was initially perceived by the investigators, as a potential complicity of the former French international hopeful, but this was not the case, the former AS Roma having agreed to testify at the trial:
“I felt indebted to all the victims. At the trial, it hit me in the face: among them, I recognized a guy I had met during a tournament. A player that I remembered very well, who had a strong character. To imagine that even a person like him could have been abused by Ahmed… At the end of the trial, I went to see him and I told him: honestly, brother, I’m so sorry. »
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To summarize
Having joined the ranks of FC Nantes and Olympique de Marseille, former midfielder William Vainqueur (35 years old) provided poignant insight into one of the biggest cases of child abuse in the history of French football.
