Sunday Times (London)
January 21, 2007, Sunday

Marseille money man keeps Eriksson waiting

Ian Hawkey

Tycoon Jack Kachcar wants to waken the sleeping French giant -and
there may be a role for Sven-Goran Eriksson

JACK KACHKAR. Good name for football’s latest takeover king, sounding
like something between Jack Cash and the suspicious fans’ question:
"So, where’s the catch?" Kachkar is the Syrian-born,
Armenian-cum-Lebanese Canadian who has just completed the initial
formalities on a E115m (£ 75.5m) purchase of France’s Olympique
Marseille.

And if his is an entirely new name to the game, it is becoming
frequently associated with an old one: Sven-Goran Eriksson.

Introducing himself to Marseille fans in the city after lodging his
pre takeover guarantees, Kachkar distanced himself from the idea that
his first big appointment would be the former England coach. He
confirmed that they had met, but at a coaching conference where their
discussions had served merely to help the businessman to orient
himself around the sport in which he was preparing to make such a
substantial investment. Kachkar had sought information from other
coaches, too, he added, without actually naming them. "We want to
work with the present team," he insisted. The current OM coach is
Albert Emon, who reports to a director of sport, the ex-Marseille
coach Jose Anigo and to the president, Pape Diouf.

That trio have taken Marseille to third in the French championnat,
which is the minimum required by the end of this season for Kachkar’s
ambitions. He wants Marseille not simply to be in the Champions
League -France’s top three qualify -but to win it under his
patronage, a tall order for a club that is not even in European
competition at the moment and with a playing staff who include one
true superstar, the restless Franck Ribery, and their most potent
striker, Djibril Cisse, only there on loan from Liverpool.

Eriksson has made it clear that a requirement for his next job is
Champions League involvement, and he has certainly been watching
Marseille closely. A trip to Dubai he made this month coincided with
that of Marseille, on their winter break. The Swede found himself in
the same hotel as the team’s players and staff, chatted animatedly to
Cisse and some of his colleagues.

Kachkar is understood to believe that Eriksson is the sort of man to
guide Marseille out of a decade and a half of corruption scandals,
frenetic turnover and bad management and place them again among the
Continent’s elite.

Eriksson’s experience at Lazio, whom he took to the Italian league
title in 2000, counts as a recommendation. But his salary
expectations would exceed several times over the wages paid to
coaches in a French league in which Gerard Houllier’s Lyon are easing
towards a sixth successive championship with a lead of 14 points over
second-placed Lens and 17 points clear of Marseille.

For all that, OM are a tempting project. The topsy-turvy 1990s, a
period featuring a European Cup triumph, followed swiftly by
punishments -including relegation for domestic match-fixing and
further scandals and slumps in the past seven years – have not eroded
the club’s status as the best supported club in the country. Or,
better phrased, the French club with the widest support base.
Marseille’s fans have a reputation, as ex-players such as Robert
Pires would bear witness. When fortunes deteriorate, players have
been vulnerable to physical attack. Groups of fans have also, under
some of Kachkar’s predecessors, held considerable power over ticket
distribution and aspects of the club’s merchandising potential.

OM have great commercial potential. The value of all French clubs has
leapt in the past year, since the league signed a television deal
worth about E1.8billion over three years, and there is a logic,
outlined by Kachkar, tothe takeover scramble that is now extending
across the Channel. "I don’t have the money to bid for Manchester
United," he said.

Kachkar is not a sugar daddy, he added, but a businessman, expecting
to make something out of Marseille. He also fits the protoype of the
new football mergers and acquisitions man. He seems to have made some
of his initial fortune out of privatisation in the old Eastern Europe
-Hungary in his case -where he graduated in medicine. He heads a
pharmaceutical company based in New York, with satellite arms in
Britain and Canada. Kachkar assured Marseille fans that he is a
francophile, although he addressed them in English, and spoke of
falling for the club when it won the 1993 European Cup final, 1-0
against Milan.

OM have been drifting for most of the time since then, but they are a
dozing giant, an appetising challenge for any chairman. Or coach.