Before the Pogba affair, other scam scandals that shook French football – Liberation

The rag burns at the Pogba’s. On Sunday, Paul, the best-known footballer of the siblings, winner of the 2018 World Cup with the French team, announced through his lawyers that legal proceedings for extortion in an organized gang were underway. for a month against his eldest Mathias, who had threatened him the day before in a video published on the social networks of “smashing revelations” concerning him. According to information from France Info, the Juventus midfielder from Turin notably accuses the Belfort player of having trapped him, with other men, some of whom were armed with assault rifles, to demand money from him. . A dark story that recalls others, in an environment where enormous amounts of money circulate, which attract the greed of the most dishonest. Freed looks back on four fraud scandals that have marked French football.

Benzema-Valbuena: a “sextape” at the heart of the discord

It is the most famous of the cheating scandals in French football. On November 24, Real Madrid star striker Karim Benzema was sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence for complicity in the attempt to blackmail his former France team-mate Mathieu Valbuena – he has since given up his appeal. Here is the case, as presented by the indictment consulted in early 2021 by Release : in 2014, a member of Mathieu Valbuena’s entourage gets his hands on a “sextape” shot by the former Marseillais, whom he then decides to blackmail. After several unsuccessful attempts, he and two of his friends set out to contact Karim Zenati, close to Karim Benzema, to put pressure on Mathieu Valbuena. On October 6, during a rally in Clairefontaine, “KB9” called out to “Petit Vélo”, according to the latter’s testimony: “Math, there’s a video it’s hot.” A conversation that will be worth to the Madrilenian to be ousted from the French team for years. “He acted to allow the negotiators to achieve their ends and the blackmailers to receive money”, will strike the prosecutor during her indictment, five years later.

Ludovic Giuly : des millions mis en gage

In 2016, Ludovic Giuly is 40 years old and his superb career, which led him from AS Monaco to Paris-Saint-Germain via FC Barcelona and AS Roma, has just ended. The midfielder undertakes to buy his main residence and seeks a mortgage from his bank. A request denied, on the grounds that the player had already “exceeded the legal debt ceiling”, will he report in the spring of 2022 in a newspaper interview the Parisian. His banker would then have explained to him that his money had been pledged to repay the investments made in retirement homes by the company Sportinvest, to which he had entrusted more than 5 million euros fifteen years earlier. The one who is now a television consultant hopes that his example will set a milestone and will push footballers to caution. “It’s so easy to say that soccer players are uneducated, don’t know how to manage and only get what they deserve. The thing is, we footballers are easy prey.” he warns.

N’Golo Kanté: a complaint rejected by the courts

Paul Pogba’s partner in the midfield of the France team during the victory at the 2018 World Cup, N’Golo Kanté has also already said he was the victim of an attempted scam. It was in November 2019, when he filed a complaint for “fraud”, “attempted fraud”, “breach of trust” et “illegal exercise of the profession of sports agent” against his former adviser Nouari Khiari. The Chelsea player then denounced the pressure exerted by the latter to recover more substantial sums of money after the termination of the contract which bound the two men. But the Paris prosecutor’s office dismissed the footballer. In 2021, he dismissed the Londoner’s complaint, considering that the offense was “insufficiently characterized”.

Yohan Mollo: “They took my life”

May 2022: Yohan Mollo comes out of the woods. The former player of the France U23 team trained at AS Monaco, who now plays in Hyères, in the fourth division, returns to the front of the stage with interviews in several of the major French sports media. Everywhere, the native of Martigues tells the same story: that of his two agents, Franck Bichon and Patrick Blondeau, who would have scammed him for more than ten years, taking out consumer loans and his name and buying real estate with the money from his account, according to his account. The player, who says to himself “ruin”, assesses the damage at around fifteen million euros, and claims to be on file with the Banque de France. “They took my life”he denounces, considering himself the victim of a scam in an organized gang in which about fifteen people would be involved. The trial is due to take place in September.