Remembering Marseille's Controversial 1993 Champions League Winners
As Ligue 1's top scorer bundled Marseille ahead against relegation-bound Valenciennes, nothing seemed out of place when the reigning champions saw out the game to secure their fifth consecutive top-flight title in 1993.
Yet, this one match, or rather the conversations over crackling telephone lines which took place before a ball was kicked, would reverberate throughout French football for years.
Two weeks after the Valenciennes match it emerged that Marseille's Jean-Jacques Eydelie had implored his former teammates to go easy on his side, in a bid to avoid injuries as much as wrapping up the title with the Champions League final against AC Milan less than a week away.
Many worthy entrants into the pantheon of football's greats were in Munich for that showpiece on 26 May, 1993, but the mythical figure of Marseille's president, Bernard Tapie, loomed larger than any other that night.
The former TV salesman used his charm and charisma to not only flog electronics, but climb the slippery rungs of the business ladder as he made his millions buying and revamping failed companies - with adidas one of his more high-profile purchases. Along the way he dabbled in politics, TV hosting and singing.
Tapie became president of Marseille in 1986 as the club finished 12th, one point above the relegation zone. Yet, with the Paris-born owner's wealth liberally pumped into the club, Marseille won four consecutive titles between 1988 to 1992 but were pipped to the elusive European Cup in the 1991 final by Red Star Belgrade.
French journalist, Christophe Bouchet, the author of L'aventure Tapie, wonderfully summed up the aura he radiated: "He's convincing because his stories always contain a grain of truth – just enough to make them plausible. I think he also comes to believe them himself."
One of the many legends concerning Tapie and this period points to the darker arts which hung over Marseille's success. The story goes that in the first leg of the 1991 European Cup semi-final, Tapie sauntered up to the Spartak Moscow press box and slipped a folded piece of paper into the hand of a French journalist along with the instruction to open it at the final whistle.
After a convincing 3-1 victory for Marseille to take into the home leg, the journalist tentatively unfurled the scrap of paper to reveal a simple, scrawled message: '3-1'.
The 1993 Marseille side was the second great team of the Tapie era. One could feasibly argue that it was inferior to the 1991 vintage which boasted 'magique Chris' Waddle and Jean-Pierre Papin, but the first ever Champions League winners weren't short of stars themselves.
Four members of the XI which started on that May night in Munich - including Marcel Desailly and captain Didier Deschamps - would end their careers as World Cup winners. Not to mention Alen Bokšić, who led the line and would finish fourth in the Ballon d'Or that year.
In the 40th minute of the final, Marseille's sweeper Basile Boli came over to the touchline, pleading with his coach Raymond Goethals to take him off as he was desperately struggling with injury. The message came back that Tapie wanted him to stay on and so that's what happened.
Three minutes later Boli somehow rose to thump a towering header past Sebastiano Rossi for the only goal of an otherwise dull affair. But Tapie and his side couldn't even get through the final without dark shadows being cast across proceedings as the goal arose from a corner which shouldn't have been awarded.
'These things happen' is a valid response to this - in the grand scheme of things - minor injustice, but the referee on that night Kurt Röthlisberger was later banned for life after being found guilty of attempting to fix a Champions League tie in 1996. Just another wrinkle in a tale of corruption on the cusp of unravelling.
As the 250,000 Franc bribe Tapie had offered the Valenciennes side came to light in the weeks following their European triumph, Marseille were stripped of their 1993 French top-flight title and banned from European competition.
A flood of accusations spilled out in the aftermath of this revelation as Tapie was lumbered with the claims of tampering with the club's finances along with an ever-growing list of match-fixing incidents, stretching far beyond a May afternoon at Valenciennes.
Tapie was eventually banned from football for life and Marseille were relegated to the second tier in 1994 but the club still appear in the honours list of Europe's premier competition (much to Milan's indignation), so far the only French side who can point to a Champions League triumph (much to Paris Saint-Germain and Lyon's indignation).
So, Tapie's time at the helm may have seen the side's success helped along the way with some less than scrupulous conduct, but Marseille were a genuinely gifted side. Sporting one of the most iconic kits of the era they can still look back at that maiden European glory with the defiant words of their fans still ringing in their ears: 'à jamais les premiers' - forever the first.