They’ve been waiting for this since I was about two years old

By: Sam | November 16th, 2006

Do the names “Bernard Tapie” or “Valenciennes Football Club” ring a bell? Probably not. Does the sentence “Marseille won the Champions League in 1993, only to have it taken away because of owner Bernard Tapie’s bribery of VAFC players to go easy on OM key players before the final against AC Milan” seem any more familiar? I suspected so.

Let’s touch up a bit on history: After the aforementioned scandal, Marseille went to Munich and won their first European Cup. The joy lasted a few days, until word got through to the media that money this, phone call that, blah blah blah, and in a matter of months OM and VAFC were relegated.

Marseille, being the club that it was, promptly got more or less back on track and got back to Ligue 1. Valenciennes, however, were less fortunate. They slumped, lost money and their good reputation, which lead to their imminent plunge into the Championnat de Football Amateur, the French equivalent of the Conference.

Slowly but surely, Valenciennes climbed back to where they belonged. Two years ago, they were champions of the Championnat de Football National, the equivalent of League One. Amazingly, they finished first in Ligue 2 the very next season, and here they are now.

During their decade-or-so of misery, you would expect the nordic club to have adopted a hate of Marseille. Believe it or not, they did! Plenty of taunting and plots of revenge are about to take place this weekend, so watch out for this historically-enhanced version of a footie match between two hungry teams.

Said Laurent Dufresne, captain of VAFC, who was playing for the club at the time as a teenager (translated from French): When you look at the results of both clubs since then, you can clearly see Valenciennes was penalized. We also suffered more. We were relegated, we encountered many difficulties. We wound up in the conference, it was a very delicate period. For us players, it was a prejudice. Everywhere we went, we were regarded differently. We had a hard time understanding it, but that’s the way it was. As for Marseille, we’d better not touch that. One way or the other, you learn. It builds character. It helped me for the rest of the way.