The city of Valenciennes has been described as the Athens of northern France, but the Olympique Marseille fans gathered in a city centre car park don’t look too impressed with it. It’s a sunny April afternoon, just a few hours before the southern club play Valenciennes in Ligue 1, and the visiting fans are being penned in for security reasons. They’re fed up. A group of 50 or so make a break for freedom from the car park and escape the police barricade holding them back. They run towards the stadium, charging at the Valenciennes fans, but the heavy police presence ends the trouble quickly and decisively.

The animosity between these two sides is clear – and with good reason. It’s the first time they’ve met at the Nungesser Stadium since 1993; the bribery scandal surrounding that game devastated both teams and left an indelible stain on modern football.

A fan walks to the game in a shirt bearing the message “OM, Je Ne T’Aime Pas”. “Our local rivals may be Lens and Lille, but Marseille are our enemy from afar,” says Eric, a Valenciennes-supporting taxi-driver in his mid-twenties. “Our hatred of them is a special one.”

Marseille are known for the passion of their fans, and Sebastian, who has driven almost 900 kilometres – from one end of France to the other – does not want to waste his energy on the opposition. “Who even are Valenciennes?” he laughs. “We don’t care about them at all. Let’s be serious: we are Marseille, we don’t go that low!” He’s more concerned about the result of today’s game than anything else.

Both teams need a result: Marseille are in fifth place and still hoping to qualify for the Champions League, while Valenciennes are looking over their shoulders to avoid relegation. It was a slightly different situation, however, when the teams last met here in Valenciennes, on May 20, 1993.

Back then, it was the crucial time of the season: Marseille needed three more points to clinch the French league and six days later were due to face AC Milan in the Champions League final. Their final game of the season, to come after the European final, was against Paris Saint-Germain, and they did not want to go into it needing to beat their arch-rivals for the title.

Their penultimate game was against Valenciennes who then, like now, were struggling in the top flight. Marseille won 1-0, and went on to win the Champions League, becoming the first and only French team to lift the European Cup, but barely had the celebrations died down when scandal rocked the French game.

Marseille were found guilty of bribing two Valenciennes players to throw their match. They were stripped of their French title, relegated, and their president Bernard Tapie was given a two-year jail sentence – of which he served five months – and banned from football for two years. Valenciennes ended the season relegated, from where they soon slipped into the backwaters of the third and fourth divisions before going bankrupt and facing a winding-up order.

“They left us in the shit for 15 years,” snorts Eric. “We were the victims, and yet all everyone talked about was Marseille this and Marseille that. What happened to us was much worse than what happened to them, and that’s why we all hate them so much.”L’OM were a well-supported but success-starved club when Bernard Tapie became club president in April 1986. Former cheesy pop star Tapie had re-invented himself as a business pioneer who bought failing firms, turned them round and sold them at a huge profit. He ran a profitable chain of health product stores, La Vie Claire, and named his first venture in sport, his own cycling team, after the store. In 1985, his cyclist Bernard Hinault won the Tour de France, and the next year Greg LeMond made it back-to-back triumphs for La Vie Claire.

Tapie was incredibly ambitious; Marseille were perfect for him. Having not won the French league for 14 years, their fans easily bought into the new man’s success-at-all-costs philosophy. “Tapie brought glamour to the club but most of all, he made the club successful,” says Arnaud, a Marseille fan who spent most of his morning stuck in that car park. “That’s all us fans were interested in.”

Tapie was a successful precursor to the Galactico reign of Florentino Perez at Real Madrid: he brought in former France coach Michel Hidalgo as director of football and signed stars such as Alain Giresse, Jean-Pierre Papin, Enzo Francescoli, Jean Tigana, Didier Deschamps, Alen Boksic, Marcel Desailly and Rudi Voller. The team played flamboyant football and weren’t afraid to let everyone know about it.

Within three years, Marseille won the French title. That summer, Tapie spent $10.6m to sign Tottenham’s Chris Waddle. “At Marseille, Tapie did everything,” Waddle remembers. “He was ultra-powerful and he was so hungry to win, that after every bad game he would become really nasty. I was afraid of him: he was always on our backs, at the hotel, the stadium, the dressing room, even at training sometimes. Tapie was the one that did the recruitment, the one that motivated the team and he said who was playing and who wasn’t.”

In 1991, Marseille reached the European Cup final, beating AC Milan on the way with an exciting front three of Waddle, Papin and Abedi Pele, but the final was a dour game which they lost on penalties to Red Star Belgrade. Though Marseille continued to walk the French league, Tapie’s dream remained the European Cup.

In 1992-93, the new Champions League used a group format to decide the finalists and Marseille emerged from a group featuring Rangers, Club Bruges and CSKA Moscow to reach their second final in three years. Awaiting them in Munich were AC Milan.

Tapie’s dream was close to fruition. By now he was a socialist MP for Marseille, a minister in the government of his mentor, French President Francois Mitterand, with his own serious ambitions of running for the French presidency. But he got greedy and, possibly, a little scared: Tapie wanted to be sure that Marseille would at least win the French title again. So he told his right-hand man, Jean-Pierre Bernes, to make the phone call that would change both of their lives.

Officially, Bernes was general director, but he was much more than that. He was the negotiator, the man behind the deals. “During my time working for Tapie, I got through more than $1.2m on corruption money for players and referees,” he now admits.

Tapie asked Bernes to offer money to some of the Valenciennes players to go easy against Marseille. Bernes had already phoned Christophe Robert, Valenciennes’ top scorer, telling him to expect a call the night before the game. Bernes enlisted the help of midfielder Jean-Jacques Eydelie for the next part of his plan. Eydelie had played at Nantes with Robert and his Valenciennes team-mate Jorge Burruchaga; he also knew the Valenciennes captain Jacques Glassman from their time together at Tours.

Robert had guessed what was going on and went straight to Glassman to ask what he should do. Glassman thought it was a joke. “I’ve always tried to understand why they would want to contact us to fix a game which in all logic, Marseille would have won anyway,” he says. But he agreed to meet with Eydelie and Burruchaga later that night to see what would happen.

At nine on the dot, the phone rang. “Christophe answered it, said a few words and passed me the phone,” recounts Glassman. “I immediately recognised the voice of Jean-Jacques, and he started explaining to me how Marseille needed to be able to win easily ahead of the European Cup final. I interrupted him to say, ‘Do you realise what you’re saying, Jean-Jacques?’

“Seeing that I wasn’t going along with the plan, he said, ‘Hold on, I’ll pass you Bernes.’ That was when I realised that there was no chance this was a joke. Bernes came on and said in a contemptuous tone, ‘Do you prefer to lose the game for nothing or with 20 grand in your pocket?’”

Glassman, the moral hero of the piece, dropped the phone. Burruchaga, who had tried to help Marseille recruit Diego Maradona a few years earlier and received nothing for his efforts, wanted guarantees that they would get paid. The details were agreed: each player was to receive $50,000 for their “help”, with a down-payment of a total of $60,000 due before the game and the rest to come one week after the match. Robert’s wife was sent to the Marseille team hotel, the Valenciennes Novotel, to pick up the cash.

Glassman didn’t sleep all night. On the afternoon of the game, he told coach Boro Primorac. Alen Boksic scored the only goal in the 21st minute; Robert limped off two minutes later. At half-time, Primorac took Glassman’s accusation to the authorities, and lodged an official complaint to the French football federation.

After the game, federation officials met with Glassman and Tapie. It was one man’s word against the other. Marseille were four days away from their date with AC Milan.Basile Boli nearly didn’t make the inaugural Champions League Final. The France defender was battling a knee injury that forced him to miss the game against Valenciennes and though he started against Milan, he knew he was not fully fit. After 20 minutes he collapsed in a heap. “My knee was killing me. I wanted to go off,” he recalls. “I felt I wasn’t giving my best and I didn’t want to let anybody down. I was in pain. But the physio said ‘There’s no way you’re going off. Tapie doesn’t want you to.’”

So he stayed on the pitch, and it was just as well he did: his header from Abedi Pele’s corner just before half-time was the only goal of the game, and Marseille were the European champions.

The Marseille players, and particularly Boli, were given a heroes’ welcome on their return to the French city, but behind the scenes the scandal was unravelling. Within weeks of the Valenciennes game, the French league had opened an investigation.

Tapie tried to cover things up, but he made things worse for himself. On June 17, he called Primorac into his office in Paris and tried to make out that the idea belonged to Bernes and, in the words of the man who is now Arsenal assistant coach, “wanted me to carry the can in the whole affair”.

Primorac went public on the meeting with Tapie. One day later, police found the $60,000 in a brown envelope buried in the garden of Robert’s aunt in Perigueux. Tapie inventively claimed that the money had been a loan to allow the player to open a restaurant, but the net was closing in. In the last week of June, Robert, Eydelie, Burruchaga and Bernes were formally put under
investigation on charges of corruption.

Tapie was still in the clear, but not for much longer. Worried by Primorac’s claim of the failed bribe, Tapie found an alibi, and said he was meeting with a fellow socialist politician, Jacques Mellick, at the time Primorac said their rendezvous had taken place. Mellick was deputy mayor of Bethune, a northern town near Lille and over 150 miles from Paris, but his high profile meant that it was easy to find witnesses – and photos – proving that he was in Bethune when Tapie said the meeting had taken place. For Mellick to reach Tapie’s office in time, he would have had to travel faster than the 200 miles per hour for which the French TGV trains are famous; the claim soon earned him the nickname “The Fastest Mayor in France”. Mellick was another victim of Tapie’s ambition, and he too would pay a heavy price.

By September 1993, UEFA had taken decisive action: Marseille were banned from defending their European crown, and barred from the Inter-Continental Cup between the champions of Europe and South America. “The fans are the ones that suffered,” says Sebastian now, “and all because Tapie got caught.”

The French FA’s punishments followed in April 1994: Marseille were demoted
a division while Tapie, Bernes, Robert and Eydelie were all suspended from French football for two years. Only Burruchaga was given a lighter sentence, his suspension stretching to two months.

The case went to a criminal trial between March 13 and March 22, 1995, and Tapie continued to protest his innocence, claiming the trial was just a political effort to silence him. Bernes testified that he had acted on the wishes of his boss. “There was an attempt at bribery on my part, on Bernard Tapie’s orders and with Jean-Jacques Eydelie as the intermediary,” he said in court. Eydelie backed up the story while Glassman, as the whistle-blower, appeared in court as the principal witness determined, as he said, “to defend my honour”.

In May, Tapie was found guilty of bribery and attempts to coerce a witness. He was jailed for two years (with 16 months suspended) and barred from public office for three years. Bernes was fined $3600 and given an 18-month suspended sentence, Eydelie got a $2400 fine and a one-year suspended sentence and Robert and Burruchaga a $1200 fine and a six-month suspended sentence. Mellick was stripped of his title and barred from public office for two years. In a bizarre twist, he has since returned to politics as the mayor of Valenciennes. You couldn’t make it up.

Yet if Mellick’s return to prominence was the perfect resurrection tale, it was somehow trumped by Tapie. The presidential wannabe served six months at the Prison de la Sante before he was transferred to Luynes and then released in July 1997. He was welcomed back into the world of showbusiness, writing a book, Free, based on his time in jail and collaborating with rapper Doc Gyneco on a song called C’est Beau, La Vie. The lyrics were typical Tapie, close to the edge and bordering on tasteless:
Doc Gyneco: So, did you buy the match?
Tapie: You must be joking, I love the guys at Valenciennes!
Doc Gyneco: Old style!

He then starred as a policeman in a prime-time TV series before landing his own talk show. His popularity was further enhanced when he played Randall McMurphy, the role made famous by Jack Nicholson, in a Paris stage adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

By April 2001, Tapie’s rehabilitation was complete and he returned to a rapturous reception to Marseille. The club was $190m in debt, struggling in 14th place, and facing a French League decision to relegate them because of their financial problems. Tapie, who originally came back in an unpaid role, had mixed success: he helped overturn the French league’s decision but soon fell out with financial director Pierre Dubiton.

Dubiton accused Tapie of doping his own players and buying off opponents, an
allegation repeated last year when Eydelie, by now out of football and living on state benefits with his wife and five children, publicised his book, I’m Not Playing, with a searing interview in L’Equipe newspaper.

Eydelie claimed that the players were given injections before the 1993 Champions League Final. “I felt strange during the match,” he alleged. “My mouth was dry and my body didn’t react like it normally does. Deceit was second nature for Marseille directors back then: many players were involved in match-fixing. We were all asked, at one time or another, to phone an old team-mate or a friend to make the arrangements.” Former Marseille forward Tony Cascarino has told a similar story in his column in The Times.

Tapie filed a suit for defamation against Eydelie, and former team-mates Didier Deschamps, Marcel Desailly and Franck Sauzee also threatened to sue over Eydelie’s claim that they all knew about the doping. Unlikely support came from Arsene Wenger, the man who has employed Primorac ever since and, as coach of Monaco between 1988 and 1994, someone whose team were more affected than most by Marseille’s run of success. “Those are things that I knew, that many people knew,” was Wenger’s response to the Eydelie interview. He added that French football “was gangrenous from the inside because of the influence and the methods of Tapie at Marseille”.

Tapie was not impressed, claiming Wenger was part of the problem and that he could expect a lawsuit as well. “Wenger coached players who were supposed to have been corrupted by Marseille for many years but it’s only now, 13 years later, that he remembers and decides to comment about this climate of corruption for the first time,” Tapie responded. “Wenger was at the heart of the issue between Marseille and Valenciennes because he was involved with Primorac and Eydelie too. He was running things in the background, telling people involved, ‘You make this official complaint and you do this and you say that.’”

Amid the controversy, the book gave Eydelie a leg-up in the football world: he was jobless when he did a book signing in Limoges and the local side’s club directors took him out for dinner. They were so impressed with his ideas on how to improve their side that they appointed him coach. Sadly, he lost seven of his first 10 games.

Bernes has also rehabilitated himself and, having gone through a divorce and therapy, is now an agent. “I don’t need Marseille to play Valenciennes to remind me of the whole affair,” he says. “I’ve never stopped thinking about it. If I could erase those years from my memory I would gladly do so.”

Of the Valenciennes players involved in the affair, Robert now works in the wine industry in Nantes, while Burruchaga is coach of Argentine side Independiente. The biggest victim of all, though, was Glassman, the central defender, former captain and whistleblower.

Glassman was booed by his own fans in Valenciennes’ last game of the season, a 4-2 defeat to Saint-Etienne that left them relegated by one point. When the French federation later ruled that Marseille’s 1-0 win would not stand, they might have handed the game to Valenciennes, who would have stayed up. Instead, both teams were deemed to have lost the match and Valenciennes began the following season in the second division.

Glassman, who had won the French title with Strasbourg in 1979, played that next season but Valenciennes were relegated again and he left. He says he was given the cold shoulder by the rest of French football and played out his career for Sainte-Rose on the island of La Reunion. Today, he works for the French PFA and swears he would do the same thing again. “Even if they’d offered me 100 million or 200 million, I would have done the same thing. It was corruption. It was dirty money.”

If there were any positives to come out of the affair, it is that French football may be cleaner now than other European countries. Since the Italian Calciopoli scandal of last summer, accusations have been made in Turkey, Poland, Holland, Belgium and Russia that matches there have been fixed and illegal betting is taking place. French football had problems of its own last season – violence in and around stadia was at an all-time high – but financial irregularities were not among them. “With hindsight perhaps it was a good thing for French football, because I’m convinced that how the league treated the whole affair helped lead to the situation today,” says current league president Frederic Thiriez. “We have a healthy championship and fair competition, so perhaps it helped us avoid the kind of situation that Italy experienced.”

Meanwhile, at the Nungesser Stadium, the 16,398 fans seem to have had the pre-match passion knocked out of them after sitting through a dire goalless draw that does neither team much good. As they drift away from the stadium following the final whistle, the consolation for Denis, a lifelong Valenciennes fan, is that Marseille might yet miss out on Champions League qualification for next season.

“Marseille make a lot of noise, and the press talk about them all of the time, but what else? This club is a bloody joke,” he says. “They think they are a big club but when did they last win a major title?”

The answer, as if he needs reminding, is the Champions League. In 1993.