Dugarry: he knew the club could not say no
Lyon made it official on Wednesday. Paulo Fonseca is leaving for Sporting, his boyhood club, and Christophe Dugarry is still angry about how it went down.
The trigger was sporting director Mathieu Louis-Jean’s account of the exit. Fonseca came to him last week, he said, to announce that Sporting had made an offer and he had accepted it. A decision of the heart, in the coach’s words. Louis-Jean said he looked for reasons, then realised it was an offer Fonseca could not turn down, and that Lyon cannot hold anyone against his will.
On RMC’s “Rothen s’enflamme”, Dugarry took that story apart. Fonseca did not ask for permission, he argued. He walked into the office and said he was going, then cried about leaving. “Scandalous” was his word for it. The World Cup winner went further: the coach knows Lyon have money problems, knows the board will not stand in his way, and that makes him “almost dishonest”.
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Rothen smells cunning
Jérôme Rothen heard the same thing in a different register. He felt “trickery” in the way Fonseca pushed. According to Rothen, Louis-Jean was surprised that the coach kept insisting in the middle of a season, but he listened anyway, and Fonseca made use of that.
Rothen also pointed to the story Fonseca has always told supporters, that Lyon are a family and everyone is in it together. The players bought into it, he said, and repaid him with the goal on Sunday. Dugarry added that the club backed Fonseca when he was suspended for six months, when they could have let him go.
Five million in the bank, no coach on the bench
The numbers are not all bad for Lyon. The club recovers a €5 million compensation fee and sheds a big salary at a time of austerity. What it does not have is a head coach with the season well under way, a situation Louis-Jean said he deeply regrets because of the timing.
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