The decline of a team is often due to a series of decisions that seem to be undeserved, until the mud is deep, and how the authorities deny it is no longer helpful. The name Bordeaux has appeared in sports news recently, generally because of the bizarre "transfer" incident of former Arsenal captain Laurent Koscielny, but in fact, this veteran team, which is currently at the bottom of Ligue 1, has long been in an eventful autumn, and the biggest stumbling block to turn over in the remaining 9 league games is not external worries, but internal troubles.
In terms of Bordeaux's glory days, even if you don't count the three Ligue 1 wins in the 80s, or give birth to famous players such as Guilles, Tigana and Zidane, the last time the team dominated Ligue 1 was only 12 years ago, and even in the 2017/18 season, under the leadership of Uruguayan star Gustavo Boyet, it can still cross the line in 6th place. However, in recent years, the reputation of U.S. money in European football has been mixed, and Bordeaux, which was acquired by General American Capital Partners and King Street Capital Management in 2018, has become one of the failures to ignore the team culture and take care of it purely from a business perspective.
Faced with financial pressure from many sources, including the less-than-expected attendance of new venues moved in the post-European Cup era, mediapro Group's default on "cutting off" huge Ligue 1 broadcast rights fees hit the team's revenue, coupled with the epidemic caused by the season, the team lost money year after year, and the potential of new stars was also "sold cheaply": for example, Sevilla defender Jules Koundé, who is favored by big teams, only received about 25 million euros in transfer fees when he sold in the summer of 2019 Aurélien Tchouaméni, another midfielder who has already taken over the French national team, also only recovered about 20 million euros when he switched to Monaco in 2020. As a result, King Street announced its divestment in April last year, and Bordeaux was once taken over by the authorities, only to play a balloon relegation with 4-3 wins at the end of the season.
Until last July, former Lille boss and Luxembourg businessman Gérard López entered Bordeaux as a "white warrior", and the decision to withdraw the bad reviews of the previous change of the logo (even the team's full name Girondins de Bordeaux de was erased) made fans hope for chaos. However, López's "double-edged" style of purging his old ministers was once regarded as the cornerstone of Lille's success in breaking the big stand and finally winning the championship, but Yu Bordeaux did the first thing: a number of high-paid main players were expelled from the first team for training, forcing them to be half pushed and half loaned or even terminated to save on salary expenses; at the beginning of the quarter, petkovic, who led the Swiss national team with tough performance but lack of club experience, was speculated to be a gambling failure in February this year Even Jersey chest sponsor Winamax tweeted self-deprecating (see picture below), and eventually terminated.
The two-man advantage of the last half still swallowed Montpellier's two eggs, which triggered the team's civil unrest: the radical die-hard fan group Ultramarines issued a statement in 1987 accusing Laurent Koscielney and veteran goalkeeper Beno t Costil of being involved in racial discrimination; the two players angrily denounced the untruthfulness, the former had earlier been removed from the player list "for the sake of the interests of the team" and transferred to a new role similar to the team's ambassador. Recently, there have been reports that the 36-year-old defender has not actually retired, and the incident can be described as confusing, and the latter is more deliberately counter-accusing fans of defamation.
There is still a glimmer of life is that Bordeaux, who have scored 22 points in 29 games, is still quite good this season, the two top scorers Huang Yisuke (Hwang Ui-Jo) and Albeth Elis have a total of 19 goals, and the rest of the schedule is also home to face Relegation opponents such as Metz (23 points) and Saint-Etienne (27 points), and to copy the script of last season's Jedi counterattack, it is imperative to unite the scattered hearts: have the heart, and fight hard.