Regarding the exclusion of Medhi Benatia:
“Yes I have a feeling of injustice! I do not accept what I consider an attack, when someone touches a member of my family. So I react. All my collaborators are from my family. As president, I defend my family, and as an institution, we must defend all our collaborators. There is a narrative around Medhi in recent weeks that I do not like and that I want to condemn.”
His opinion on the level of arbitration in France:
“I worked for almost three seasons in Spain, I had a problem with a single referee who spoke to me very badly, and we solved that with dialogue. But here there is no dialogue, we do not put ourselves in the other’s position. I am not going to victimize myself here, saying: ‘It’s always against OM’. What I am asking for is more consistency, towards everyone. And in our particular case, we feel especially targeted. I was sanctioned this season for saying to the referee: ‘You can’t handle pressure, my friend‘. The referee said I was threatening. At the same time, we identified five or six situations where it was said that the referee was not impartial, oriented towards a certain club… And we are the only team to have been sanctioned by the disciplinary committee. The treatment is not the same for everyone.”
On the known fight in the South bend:
“These are images that have no place in football… An internal investigation is underway.”
His reaction to John Textor’s attacks on Nasser al-Khelaïfi at the start of the week:
“I do not consider that Lyon is the team best placed to seek and talk about fairness after the registration this Wednesday and the formalization of the loan of Thiago Almada.“
