2023-12-21 14:51:30
Concern for the health of players or discrimination against those who celebrated Ramadan? Locker room talk or harassment? The Nice criminal court (Alpes-Maritimes) ruled this Thursday on the accusations against Christophe Galtier when he was coach of OGC Nice. While the Nice public prosecutor, Damien Martinelli, had requested a one-year suspended prison sentence and a 45,000 euro fine, the French technician was finally released.
Returned to Qatar where his Al-Duhail team is due to play on Thursday afternoon, Christophe Galtier was not present in Nice this Thursday. He was represented by his lawyers, Mes Sébastien Schapira and Olivier Martin. During Friday’s hearing, where he was present unlike the accusers, the former Paris Saint-Germain coach refuted all of the comments attributed to him, judging them to be false, distorted or misinterpreted.
The prosecution had accused an “ordinary background of racism”
It was an incendiary email sent by Julien Fournier in May 2022 that broke this affair. Then general director of OGC Nice, Fournier claimed that Galtier had complained in August 2021 about a team with “too many blacks and Muslims”, in particular after being attacked by people from Nice one evening at the restaurant .
In their hearings, Fournier and some of those close to him had also mentioned Galtier’s anger at the choice of certain players not to suspend Ramadan on match days, as did, for example, the Muslim players from Lille with whom he had won the championship the previous season. An attitude that Damien Martinelli had strongly criticized. He estimated that the coach had “exploited” Ramadan to “seek to reduce the number of blacks and Muslims in the team”. All against a background of ordinary racism on which Mr. Galtier is not entirely lucid.
He was also accused of having described two opposing black defenders as “King Kong” on the sidelines of a meeting. “It was to evoke strength and power,” he then justified himself, ensuring that he would have used the same terms to designate Nicolas Pallois, the central defender of FC Nantes.
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