Embrasted stadiums, devastated backstage: French football has never accumulated so many fireplaces. Between the senatorial survey which unveiled in the spring the gaping faults of its governance, the resounding fiasco of television rights and the decision, acted in Federal Council, to dissolve purely and simply the Professional Football League (LFP) by 2026, the landscape was literally returned. Successive financial audits, suspicions of conflicts of interest, catastrophic assessments: everything has contributed to feeding distrust, while several clubs saw their accounts passed by independent firms mandated by the State.
To this institutional decay, violent episodes were added in the stands – interrupted matches, ground invasions and cascading sanctions – and a season gangrenous by repeated arbitral controversies, from the erratic recourse to the VAR to suspicions of political pressure on the arbitral body. Suffice to say that the exercise 2024-2025, completed in the confusion, prepared the field for a new thunderclap: the explosive complaint revealed this July 4, 2025 against several ponts of hexagonal football, which the following two paragraphs detail in depth.
9 charges against influential leaders!
According to information from Ouest-Francein its new complaint filed on July 4, 2025 with the National Financial Prosecutor's Office, the AC Association! Anticorruption has further expanded the spectrum of an already sulfurous file since the survey opened in February 2024 for embezzlement of public funds, following the creation of the LFP commercial subsidiary. In addition to the searches carried out on November 5, 2024 at the headquarters of the League and the hearings carried out within the framework of a senatorial commission of inquiry, the association now targets by name a constellation of influential actors: the president of the LFP Vincent Labrune, the boss of PSG Nasser Al – Khelaïfi, but also several club leaders – Jean – Pierre Caillot (Reims), Laurent Nicollin (Montpellier), Loïc Féry (Lorient), Waldemar Kita (Nantes), Jean – Pierre Rivère (Nice), Bernard Caïazzo (ex – Asse) – as well as the former mayor of Poissy, now deputy, Karl Olive. They are targeted by nine counts of exceptional gravity: scam in organized gang, association of criminals, aggravated extortion, illegal taking of interests, aggravated money laundering, tax evasion, breach of trust and embezzlement of public funds, without forgetting the violation of sports law.
The heart of the complaint describes a “vast scam” founded, according to AC! Anticorruption, on the centralization of power around the Tandem Al – Khelaïfi/Labrune: manipulation of TV rights to promote beIN Sports, taxation of the brand Visit Qatar in sponsorship contracts, and troubled role attributed to the international pitch broker and its founder Paul McGrath. The financial links between the LFP, the CVC Capital Partners Fund and the Qatari interests have sifted through, just like the surprise election of Labrune in 2020 – at the expense of Michel Denisot – then his disputed re -election in 2024 against Cyril Linette. The association affirms that some presidents would have been “encouraged” to support the ex -OM leader, whose remuneration would have finally doubled despite the announcement of a salary drop linked to the abolition of its variable share; The purchase of the new Parisian headquarters of the LFP for 127 million euros is also among the points deemed suspicious. So many elements which, promises independent journalist Romain Molina in a book expected on July 7, could reveal the underside of a system intended to “divert the resources of French football in favor of foreign private interests”.
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