For 30 years, the Champions League has been producing champions, but none more controversial than the competition’s very first. Marseille remain the only French side to have won the Champions League since it was rebranded for the 1992-93 season. In the 1993 final, Raymond Goethals’ side beat the legendary AC Milan of Franco Baresi, Paolo Maldini, Frank Rijkaard and Marco van Basten, with a single goal from sweeper Basile Boli securing a 1-0 victory in Munich. This achievement was overshadowed by a match-fixing scandal that led to Marseille being stripped of the Ligue 1 title they won that same season and relegated from the French top flight.
Marseille had invested heavily in their squad following their defeat by Red Star Belgrade in the 1991 European Cup final. Fabien Barthez and Marcel Desailly were signed for defence, while Alen Boksic was acquired to score the goals. The Croatia international obliged with six in the 1992-93 European campaign, as did midfielder Franck Sauzee. With three wins and three draws from six group games, Marseille narrowly edged out Scottish champions Rangers to meet Milan in the final.
Reports soon emerged that all was not as it seemed when Marseille visited relegation-threatened Valenciennes needing a victory to be sure of the Ligue 1 title. Jacques Glassmann said he had been offered 250,000 francs – at the time around £30,000 – to “take his foot off the gas” by Marseille midfielder Jean-Jacques Eydelie, a former team-mate at Nantes. Two other Valenciennes footballers, Jorge Burruchaga and Christophe Robert, were also offered bribes. Robert’s wife went to the Marseille team hotel to pick up a bag of notes, which was later found buried in her mother’s garden.
Criminal investigations began, as did the footballing recriminations. Marseille were stripped of the Ligue 1 title, relegated and denied the right to defend their Champions League title. Runners-up PSG turned down both the Ligue 1 title and Marseille’s Champions League place, with owners, TV company Canal+, worried about losing subscribers in the south of France. And so third-placed Monaco took over the 1993-94 Champions League slot, while the honour of being 1992-93 Ligue 1 champions was left vacant in the record books.
Marseille were allowed to keep their continental crown, as there was no evidence any of the match-fixing had taken place in European matches. Bernard Tapie, president of Marseille, was handed a two-year jail sentence – of which he served eight months – while Eyedelie, then 27 and seemingly approaching the peak of his career, was given a suspended sentence and banned from football for 18 months. Eyedelie’s autobiography claimed players were given suspicious injections before the game against Milan and these claims were backed up by his team-mates. Uefa rechecked the anti-doping tests taken at the time and confirmed they were negative, while Tapie unsuccessfully sued Eyedelie for libel.
Marseille remain the inaugural Champions League winners, albeit with a gigantic moral asterisk next to their name. The first-ever winners of the Champions League will forever remain shrouded in controversy.