When American sports fans last heard about Frank McCourt, he was being forced to sell the Dodgers after his excessive personal spending and nuclear divorce proceedings pushed the team into bankruptcy. In the nine years since he left Los Angeles, McCourt remarried and bought another sports team — this time, legendary French soccer club Olympique de Marseille, located in the city of the same name — and what’s happening there could make McCourt’s tenure in Tinseltown look like a smashing success.
At the end of January, angry OM supporters stormed the club’s training facility to confront players and staff over the team’s poor play, sparking a fiery riot that saw defender Alvaro Gonzalez get hit by a flying object. Marseille’s match that evening was postponed.
Les supporters de l’OM sont entrés dans le centre d’entraînement ! 🚨🚨 #EyraudDemission #OM #TeamOM pic.twitter.com/7A5hp9O3Er
— Supporter de l’équipe qui a la seule étoile LDC (@MarseilleChamp2) January 30, 2021
The club said that the demonstration caused several hundred thousand euros worth of damage. In a statement condemning the event, McCourt compared the clash to the U.S. Capitol insurrection. “What happened some weeks ago in Washington D.C. and what happened yesterday in Marseille follow a comparable logic: a few sources feed an inferno of opinions, invectives, and threats that are amplified by social media creating the conditions that lead to violence and chaos,” McCourt said.
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Meanwhile, what happened with the Dodgers and what’s happening with Marseille arguably follow a comparable logic: Both teams were owned by McCourt when their daily business graduated from local sports page to worldwide headlines due to their dysfunction.
Before McCourt owned the team, Marseille was owned by French billionaire and onetime Adidas CEO Robert Louis-Dreyfus (actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ second cousin, once removed) from 1996 until his death from leukemia in 2009. He left the club and the rest of his considerable fortune to his wife, Margarita. (Forbes estimates she is worth $5.6 billion, making her the richest Russian-born woman in the world.) Under her ownership, the club won its first Ligue 1 title in 25 years during the 2009-2010 season, but she showed little interest in injecting her own money into Marseille and sold the team to McCourt for 45 million euros in 2016. She maintained a five percent stake in the club.
Initially, OM fans were excited about the sale. “But there was some confusion because at first we heard the Dodgers’ American billionaire owner was interested in buying the club, so we thought it was the Guggenheim Group,” said Mathieu Grégoire, a journalist who covers Marseille for L’Equipe, the French national sports newspaper.
When McCourt took over, he announced an ambitious “OM Champions Project” and told the club’s fans that he would invest 200 million euros into the club immediately to help it qualify for the UEFA Champions League. Only the top three finishers in the 20-team Ligue 1 season get to play in Europe’s top club competition.
“He (McCourt) said he could buy the best player in the world, (Lionel) Messi, if needed,” said Guillaume, who runs the popular Marseille fan Twitter account, OManiaque, but declined to give his last name, preferring to remain anonymous. “He really set the bar high. We started asking ourselves if he really knew what he was talking about, if he knew anything about soccer. Even if we had doubts about him, we needed to dream a little dream after years of bad sports results.”
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Grégoire said he was riding in a car with McCourt when McCourt learned his bid to purchase Marseille had been accepted. He said McCourt knew nothing about soccer at the time.
“We were all wondering what this American real estate guy was doing buying Marseille or if he knew what he was getting into,” Grégoire said. “But he said he was going to spend money, which is what people wanted to hear.”
With a population of about 900,000, Marseille is the second-largest city in France. It sits 480 miles south of Paris, just east of where the Rhone River drains into the Mediterranean Sea.
OM was founded in 1899. For the last 122 years, the mood of the city has been tied to how well its team is performing. “In Marseille, the stadium is the first thing you think of when you think of the city,” said Loic Pialat, a freelance journalist living in Long Beach, Calif., who was born in Paris in 1980 and grew up a Marseille fan. “This soccer club is not like a regular company. It’s the heart of the city. There’s too much passion around it to treat it like just another business.”
When McCourt bought the Dodgers, he faced similar questions about whether he knew what he was getting himself into. He had tried and failed to buy his hometown Boston Red Sox before he was able to buy the Dodgers from News Corporation. The Dodgers were losing money, and the telecommunications and entertainment giant was so desperate to unload the team that it agreed to effectively trade it for a parking lot McCourt owned in Boston.
At his introductory press conference after buying the Dodgers in January of 2004, McCourt said he was invested in restoring the glory days of Dodger baseball. “We’ve committed not just to buy this team, but to win a world championship,” he said. After acknowledging he understood fan frustration over the Dodgers not winning a single playoff game, let alone a championship, since 1988, he said things would change with him in charge.
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“My first objective is to end the drought,” McCourt said. “I know I can provide the leadership the team needs to win.”
Under McCourt, the Dodgers advanced to the National League Championship Series in 2008 and did so again in 2009. The organization drafted future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw out of high school and found All-Star closer Kenley Jansen in Curacao. But each time the Dodgers appeared to be on the precipice of breaking through with just a few key free-agent signings, the team failed to pounce. Rumors swirled that McCourt, who put no money down to buy the Dodgers, was broke.
But how could that be? The Dodgers either led the NL in attendance or were second in each of the first seven seasons McCourt owned the club. The truth about McCourt’s money problems was worse. During his divorce trial with his first wife, Jamie, financial filings revealed that the McCourts had spent lavishly when the Dodgers provided their sole income. They purchased several mansions in the L.A. area, had a hair stylist on a six-figure salary retainer and even hired a psychic to think positive thoughts during Dodgers games.
The McCourts funded this lifestyle, in part, by taking out large loans against future season ticket sales. When Major League Baseball made it impossible for McCourt to borrow any more money, the Dodgers were forced to declare bankruptcy, which triggered the sale to the Guggenheim Group.
Frank McCourt’s ownership of Marseille was supposed to be different. For starters, he came into the situation flush with cash. He was able to sell the Dodgers to the Guggenheim Group for a then-record $2.15 billion because the Dodgers’ television rights deal with Fox was about to expire, leaving the new owners the ability to launch their own lucrative television network. It’s unclear exactly how much McCourt netted after he paid off his debtors and his ex-wife, but he was much better off financially than when he arrived in L.A.
McCourt left the Dodgers in horrible shape, but his mismanagement of the organization was so gross that it wound up being something of a blessing in disguise for disgusted Dodgers fans. Had he not so thoroughly run the team’s finances into the ground, MLB never would have stepped in and forced the sale of the club to a rich ownership group that has consistently spent money — and won — since it purchased the team.
McCourt did fulfill his promise to inject 200 million euros into Marseille, but he saw little return on his investment. Most of that money was misspent on aging players, and it was a paltry sum compared to the cash being pumped into Marseille’s bitter rival, Paris Saint-Germain, which has been owned by the ruler of Qatar since 2011.
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A few days after McCourt bought OM, he installed Jacques-Henri Eyraud as club president to oversee Marseille’s day-to-day operations. McCourt continued to live in the United States.
At publication time, McCourt had not responded to a request for comment sent through the team.
Eyraud is from Paris. And as the club slid further into disarray under his watch, some OM fans came to believe he was a secret supporter of PSG.
Eyraud did not help his cause when he said earlier this year that Marseille’s problem was that its front office had too many fans of the club in suits. For weeks before the riot, OM supporters protested before each home match and hung banners on bridges and motorways. One banner read “Parisians: get out of here.” Another said: “JHE, Marseille vomits you out.”
"JHE : MARSEILLE TE VOMIT"#TeamOM pic.twitter.com/XFBsDRGlMN
— Massalia (@bibifircotin_OM) January 30, 2021
Most of the fan ire was directed toward Eyraud, largely because McCourt is rarely in Marseille. Grégoire said McCourt went to a couple of home matches during his first year as owner and maybe one game a year after that. “He might go when the team plays in Monaco because I think he has a house near there,” Grégoire said.
On February 19, several groups of Marseille supporters gave a press conference to address the team’s troubles. Rachid Zeroual, head of the group called Les Winners, had this to say when asked what McCourt should do about salvaging his reputation with fans: “First, he should come out of his castle. We don’t know where he is. We want an owner who is not a ghost, someone who’s here when things go bad.” A week later, McCourt fired Eyraud.
Grégoire estimates that, since McCourt purchased Marseille in 2016, the club has lost roughly 500 million euros. After the club’s win over Rennes on Wednesday, Marseille sat in sixth place in the Ligue 1 standings — 20 points behind leader Lille, 18 points behind second-place PSG and 17 points behind third-place Olympique Lyonnais and the final Champions League spot.
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It’s unclear how McCourt could turn a profit at this point, but frequent trips to the UEFA Champions League would help.
“He doesn’t understand how to compete,” Grégoire said of McCourt. “The owners of Saint-Germain made a $1.5 billion investment to win. Football is very complicated in a closed league. He has no concept of this. For the moment, his investment is catastrophic.”
Since he demonstrates no obvious passion for the sport, it’s unclear why McCourt is holding on to Marseille beyond the fact that finding a buyer to cover his losses might prove difficult. Grégoire said that, because of additional massive financial issues due to fans not being allowed during the pandemic, McCourt might need to sell the club for a billion dollars to turn a profit. In early February, rumors that a member of the Saudi royal family was in talks to buy Marseille from McCourt grew so loud that McCourt was forced to release a statement denying it.
“He might be waiting for the formation of a (European) super league with teams like Barcelona and Manchester United, but there’s no guarantee Marseille would be included in that,” Grégoire said. “He knows nothing about soccer, and he has no ties to the area. The main question everyone is asking is ‘Why is he here?’”
McCourt attempted to answer that question when he told Marseille mayor Benoit Payan that part of his interest in owning the club stems from his father, who he said was a member of the 14th Armored Division of the U.S. Army that landed in Marseille on October 29, 1944 and helped liberate France during World War II. Last week, McCourt flew to Marseille to do a crisis PR tour of media interviews that L’Equipe dubbed “Operation Seduction” on its front page. He pledged to spend more time in the city and said he has no intention of selling the club because he wants it to be owned by his children and his grandchildren.
Of course, McCourt said the same thing about the Dodgers. And perhaps his children and grandchildren would indeed have one day owned the Dodgers if MLB had not forced a sale.
Payan told L’Equipe that if McCourt does not sell the team he will have no choice but to pour more money into it, since that is what it will take to be successful. Added Payan: “On verra s’il nous a joué de la flute.” That translates to “We’ll see if he plays the flute,” which is a French saying that means entertaining the crowd with no intention of following through with what you promise. As for why the mayor got involved, Pialat says it comes with the territory.
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“l’OM is also a matter of politics in Marseille. It may be the only place in France where it matters so much,” Pialat said. “When the team does well, the city is happy and the mayor benefits. That’s why McCourt could not go to Marseille and just talk to the fans and the media. When you own l’OM, you own part of the city’s soul.
“So it begs the question: Do you want someone like McCourt to own a part of your soul?”
The Athletic UK’s Dominic Fifield contributed to this story
(Illustration: John Bradford/ The Athletic; Photos: Catherine Steenkeste, Lisa Blumenfeld / Getty Images)