As expected, the Board of Directors of the Professional Football League confirmed the postponement of the clash between Lens and PSG – initially scheduled for April 11 – to May 13. The meeting between Brest and Strasbourg, qualified for the quarter-finals of the Europa Conference League, suffered the same fate. For the LFP, “this decision is part of the strong strategic line of the Board of Directors to allow France to maintain its fifth place in the UEFA index.”
Still, it has given rise to numerous interpretations since yesterday. If Brest is only slightly affected by this arrangement, given the low stakes of its end of season in L1, this situation raises a few more questions about the concept of fairness vis-à-vis Lens, PSG’s challenger for the title, and who will not play for two weeks after the derby against Lille (April 4), before playing three matches between May 8 and 16. Joseph Oughourlian maintained yesterday that his squad was not equipped to play every three days, unlike PSG, and the boss of Lens made this known in his own way to Vincent Labrune.
Lens has it bad
According to The Teamthe Lensois president would have denounced, on the sidelines of the CA, a postponement “considerably distorting the Lensois calendar”, and he would also have estimated that the League could have been more foresighted, to the extent that seeing PSG reach the quarter-finals of the Champions League was not an insurmountable thing. Its general director Benjamin Parrot added that this decision “undermined the merit of the Lens season”, stressing that he found it strange that the calendar of the most powerful was lightened while that of the weakest was made heavier.
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During this exchange, Labrune would have reminded Oughourlian that he himself had voted, when he was a member of the League’s board of directors, for these measures aimed at protecting European clubs so that the L1 could fight with the Big Four. A remark little appreciated by the Lensois boss, who noted that his counterpart was no longer talking about Big Five… but about Big Four. The two leaders would have exchanged a few barbs on TV rights, French football worth a billion, and even multi-ownership after Labrune had dared to say that the measures taken to protect European clubs had allowed the arrival of BlueCo in Strasbourg. This exit would have made Oughourlian, also owner of Millonarios (Colombia) and minority shareholder of Zaragoza (Spain), retort, implicitly, that there was nothing to boast about that a French club (Strasbourg) was secondary in a timeshare. Atmosphere.
