In 2020, Mourad Boudjellal, alongside Mohamed Ayachi Ajroudi, tried to buy Olympique de Marseille from Franck McCourt. A stinging failure, while the American and the French club have always denied having considered such a possibility. In the Sunday newspaperthe current president of the Hyères football club (N2) reveals everything about this highly publicized affair.
The sale of OM is a sea serpent. In 2020, Mohamed Ajroudi reported himself in the press, through Mourad Boudjellal, his main partner in this story, to seize Olympique de Marseille , club at the time owned by Frank McCourt, and which is still in place.
Very visible in the media, the duo could not get their hands on the winner of the Champions League in 1993. At OM, we saw no attempt at destabilization.
“We were totally delirious”
Mourad Boudjellal, several months later, confided: this takeover project had no real basis. And the former main shareholder of the Rugby club Toulonnais has regrets around this affair: “In this story, I let myself be seduced, it was exciting. I never wanted to buy OM but (Mohamed) Ajroudi, he perhaps had the means or the investors for it. Except he just wanted to go back and forth. And above all, he lied because he never had contact with (Frank) McCourt, when he assured me. The media coverage drove him crazy. (…) We were totally delirious, ridiculous”.
In June 2022, Mourad Boudjellal had even indicated that he wanted to apologize to Frank McCourt for all this agitation around the Marseille club. For his part, in an interview dating from November, the journalist Thibaud Vézirian, who surfed the wave of a takeover of OM a lot, affirmed that the Tunisian Mohamed Ajroudi had not “not the shoulders” to take over the Marseille club.
Boudjellal would have “plant”
Wanting to be lucid about his own abilities, Mourad Boudjellal indicated that he would not have been able to succeed at Olympique de Marseille, in the event of the club being taken over by Mohamed Ajroudi, which would have propelled him to the presidency of the 3rd in Ligue 1: “I haven’t been good, but I don’t care about my image. Even (Pablo) Picasso makes drafts. (…) So much the better that it didn’t happen with OM. It was way too big to start. I think I would have failed miserably. And that I would have been driven out of Marseilles with tar and feathers”.
Wishing to make Marseille fans dream, Mourad Boudjellal had notably indicated that at the head of the Marseille club, the president of Hyères would have tried to attract Zinedine Zidane to the OM bench.
Selling, now what?
If the sale of OM is a possibility, in the event of a major offer, this now seems a long way off. Even if the recent partnership between the Olympian team led by Igor Tudor and the CMA-CGM brand has revived the rumors, to a much lesser degree.
