He lasted less than five months: arriving in September to replace Marcelino, Italian coach Gennaro Gattuso will already leave Olympique de Marseille, a club that he has not managed to put back into working order and which remains marked by an almost sickly instability. The Italian technician (46 years old) arrived at the head of OM at the end of September 2023 to replace the Spaniard Marcelino, who left after five matches and in the wake of the famous stormy meeting between the club management and the representatives fan groups.
Amicable breakup
But despite encouraging first weeks, when he judged to have “a ‘puta madre’ locker room”, Gattuso did not manage to rectify the situation of a team which has not won a single match in the league in 2024 and is at the ninth place in the ranking, far from qualifying for a European Cup. Apart from its narrow success in the Coupe de France against Thionville (1-0), a 5th level team, Marseille has not won since December 17 and the reception of Clermont.
According to a source close to the negotiations, the separation between the two parties should take place in the form of an amicable breakup and not a layoff. It was recorded at the end of a meeting between Gattuso and his leaders Monday morning, the day after a sad defeat in Brest (1-0), the Italian having admitted “no longer having solutions” to relaunch the ‘OM, according to this same source.
Already last week, after a draw conceded in the last seconds against Shakhtar Donetsk in the Europa League, Gattuso expressed his helplessness in the face of his men’s inability to hold on to a result. “You say to yourself, ‘how do I win?’. But all season we’ve had this kind of problem, it’s been like that since I arrived. How we solve them, I don’t know, I have to badly,” the Italian admitted.
Gasset as interim?
Even if his management then assured him of maintaining their confidence, the signal sent by the 2006 world champion was negative, that of a man short of solutions. Sunday after the lost match in Brest, he again felt that his team had “hit rock bottom” and he said he was “disappointed in himself”. In these conditions, its situation was untenable and the club’s management chose to act quickly as a fundamental week opens for OM with the receptions of Shakhtar on Thursday and Montpellier on Sunday.
According to the source consulted by OM, Gattuso’s successor should be a “man of blows, capable of getting into the heads of his players and rather Francophile” and the name of Jean-Louis Gasset “stands out”, perhaps for an interim position until the end of the season. Aged 70, the former assistant to Laurent Blanc in the French team and Paris SG, has just left the Ivory Coast selection during the African Cup of Nations. The man who will take his place on the Marseille bench on Thursday will in any case have the mission of saving what can still be saved, that is to say to try to secure a European place at the end of the season, the Top 4 and the Champions League is now very far away, eight lengths ahead.
This new jolt also serves as a reminder of the extent to which OM is incapable of building continuity. Since the arrival of Pablo Longoria as president three years ago, Jorge Sampaoli, Igor Tudor, Marcelino and Gattuso have led the team, in addition to temporary workers Nasser Larguet and Jacques Abardonado. Longoria is therefore working on the next stage, while this stormy season bears the weight of each of his questionable or failed choices: recruitment of Marcelino then Gattuso, frantic and failed transfer windows, weakening of the squad.