More details are emerging on Adrien Rabiot and Jonathan Rowe’s Marseille dressing room fight and they continue to get more shocking.
The pair allegedly clashed after a Ligue 1 opening defeat to Rennes, and they’ve since both been dropped from the squad and transfer listed.
With the story dominating French football, both OM president Pablo Longoria and sporting director Medhi Benatia have had to come out to explain themselves.
The latter has now spoken, and given some more shocking details.
“What happened is very serious. It’s very serious for a football club,” the former defender said.
“I saw the players, I saw the players’ faces. There were players who were shocked. I have agents who have been calling me for three days. The players say, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this’.
“We started with physical confrontations, punches. These are things that happen. We have a boy who, at that moment, has a kind of vasovagal crisis [fainted], little Bakola, to be precise, who falls to the ground, and all of this in a locker room, a scene of chaos, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Adding on Rabiot, he said: “I really like him, I already did, and I still do, as a man and as a football player. But when there’s behaviour like this, you can’t let it go.”
Longoria has also added more detail, saying: “I wasn’t in the locker room. But what I can say is that all the staff told me was that it was something very aggressive that crossed all boundaries.
“We had to make a decision after an event that went beyond the acceptable limits in a football club.
“Roberto De Zerbi has been coaching for 13 years, Medhi Benatia has been in top-level football since he was 22, I started in professional football 20 years ago.
“I think the three of us have enough experience to say that we have never seen such violence in a locker room.
“The club is a victim of the situation. Do you think that I, the president of Olympique de Marseille, am happy to arrive in this type of situation with one of the most successful players of last season, whom I presented as an example?
“Honestly, as a club, we are suffering from the situation. We are the victim of a fight without limits, which is completely unheard of in the world of football.”
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