Assistant to PSG, success at Saint-Etienne, fiasco during the CAN… Who is Jean-Louis Gasset, the new coach of Olympique de Marseille?

Jean-Louis Gasset will put his bags on the ejection bench of the Marseille team, for four months, in the company of his usual assistant Ghislain Printant. This is the fourth coach in the space of seven months.

Permanent change at Olympique de Marseille. OM coach Gennaro Gattuso was fired and replaced by Jean-Louis Gasset. This choice by the Marseille team is not really surprising. Among the criteria set, it was necessary to find an experienced, French-speaking trainer, capable of repairing sore heads and who would accept a short mission, in this case a contract until June 30.

Jean-Louis Gasset obviously ticks all the boxes. He was Laurent Blanc’s assistant at Paris Saint-Germain, Bordeaux and the French team. He then successfully served as a firefighter, always in Bordeaux, and especially in Saint-Etienne. From a relegated club, he made ASSE a team qualified for Europe. On the other hand, his last experience on a bench was a fiasco. During the last African Cup of Nations, he left the Ivorian selection after the humiliating defeat against Equatorial Guinea (0-4), in the group stage. Without him, Ivory Coast had a string of successes and won the competition.

Instability among coaches and a workforce upset every summer

For Albert Emon, former OM player and coach, the players will have to follow in the footsteps of Jean-Louis Gasset to redress the situation. “He still has some experience as a coach. He went through some pretty complicated times at Saint-Etienne, he straightened them out. We are already two and a half months from the end of the championship, it’s going very quickly. moment, the players must realize that it is not the coaches who play but them.”

The fact remains that OM is still affected by an almost unhealthy instability. This is part of the club’s DNA, and even more so since the arrival of Pablo Longoria as president of the club in 2021. Jean-Louis Gasset is already the 7th coach in the space of three years. As for the workforce, it was turned upside down every summer, every winter, with more failure than success. As evidenced by the Portuguese Vitinha, the club’s most expensive recruit with 27 million euros, who arrived in January 2023 and left a year later on loan.

Marseille supporters are having difficulty keeping up, and have been displaying their discontent for several weeks. The September meeting, which precipitated the departure of the Spaniard Marcelino, did not change the club’s situation one iota, it just delayed the deadline. Marseille is only six points from the European places, but these six points seem to be an insurmountable chasm for Marseillais who have not won in the league since December 17.