Jose Anigo: The French coach’s life as a film

When, in the summer of 2017, Yiannis Kompotis announced that the new coach of Levadeaikos would be Jose Anigo, many thought it was a mistake or a synonym. How else could they believe that the man who led Marseille to the UEFA Cup final in 2004 and then coached them for almost a decade would agree to take charge of a disreputable Greek team that was struggling every year to stay in the 1st class?

There was no issue of error or synonymy. Jose Anigo of Levadeako was the same Jose Anigo who in his career had brought out or worked with super players such as Drogba, Valbuena, Ribery, Ben Arfa, Mandana, Bartez and a bunch of others, with a significant footprint in the field of football. But why a man with such a full resume ended up from the salons to the threshing floor is a long story, a part of which goes far beyond the narrow confines of football.

The temporary (until recently) coach of Olympiakos did not live in a beautiful, moral and angelic world. Raised in the great port of Marseille where gang law and the Marseilles mafia rule, part of his journey in life and football took place on the dark side of the moon, in situations that could hardly be faced by an unsuspecting person who just happened to be there to deal with the ball.

Life is never easy under such special circumstances. Anigo grew up in Consolas, a notorious area of ​​Marseille that feeds the eponymous gang that controls the port with its children. Many children of this neighborhood become members of the Consola mafia and are involved from a young age in drug dealing, pimping, extortion and gambling.

Football offered a way out for Jose Anigo to escape this fate. And he succeeded up to a point, but without permanently severing him from the umbilical cord that connected him to the neighborhood of his childhood. He spent most of his career as a footballer in Marseille, counting from 1979 to 1987 more than 200 professional games, which did not allow him to abandon his old clubs even though he left the city in the west of his career for to compete in smaller teams in the region.

His bond with the club was very strong and when he returned to Marseille, he began his coaching career in Marseille’s infrastructure departments, until he took the opportunity to become interim first team coach at the start of the 2001-02 season. His disagreements with the infamous Bernard Tapie, who had returned to the team after his legal adventures, sent him back to the infrastructure departments until January 2004, when he was called back to take over as caretaker manager at Marseille, which was between wear and tear.

Under his guidance, the team picked themselves up, achieved major qualification (Liverpool, Inter Milan, Newcastle) in Europe and improbably reached the final of the UEFA Cup where they lost to Valencia due to a rather unnecessary penalty taken by (?) Bartez, with the additional penalty of his expulsion from Colinas. And in the league, where Marseille was going for relegation, he managed to finally win a European ticket.

The proud sale of Drogba to Chelsea for almost 30 million euros, an unreal amount by the standards of the time, did not help the Marseilles to get back on their feet. Anigo was sacked due to poor results at the start of the following season, but the following year he took over as manager and held it until 2013, with major successes for the club including a league and three Cups, plus 5 appearances in the Champions League League and 4 others in the UEFA Cup.

This route was not easy. After months of wiretapping by the police, Añigo found himself at the center of a major scandal when it was alleged that Richard Deruda, a childhood friend and leading figure in the underworld, was blackmailing him so that his son, Thomas, would play in Marseille, an issue that in 2006 it caused the resignation of its coach, Jean Fernandez.

The case had caused a great stir and Añigo became the cover of a French magazine with the title “The Godfather Revolts” where, speaking himself, he explained that although he had withdrawn from his old neighborhood because of football, he did not see why he should cut ties with his childhood friends.

Although this story tarnished his image, it did not remove him from the group, where he remained for several years until he received a very strong blow from life itself: in 2013, mobsters executed with 12 bullets his son, Adrien, in a settlement of accounts for underworld affairs, which had earlier landed him in prison, for robbery. Adrien Añigo was the 15th murder victim that year in Marseille, by members of the local mafia.

At that time Jose Anigo was going through new legal adventures, accused of “gifts” under the table from various transfers of Marseille, in which he had taken on the duties of official coach for the third time. He was acquitted of that charge in 2015, but the whole story was too ticklish to pass up painlessly. The transfers of Zignac from Toulouse and Diavara from Bordeaux have long fed the French media with juicy details, with many managers and members of the mafia involved in the whole scene.

The loss of his child was a “knife” for Anigo and forced him to make drastic changes in his life, such as leaving Marseille and French football. He first found refuge in Morocco and then in Greece, first in Levadeiakos which led him to 8th place in 2017-18 and soon after in Panionios, from which he was sacked halfway through the year as they were on the verge of relegation.

It was this route that brought him to Greece, to groups that normally he would not have even looked at if all these unpleasant things had not occurred that determined the course of his life differently. “Little by little, thanks to Morocco and Greece, I am opening up. There is always a sense of loss, but now I live it differently. I live it with the certainty that my son would want me to be where I am now. He would like me to never forget him, he would like me to continue living” he said in an interview with Ekip.

In the person of Anigo, Vangelis Marinakis saw an opportunity. He approached him to help him at Nottingham where he handed him the role of transfer manager in October 2019, with the prospect of returning the club to the Premier League after an absence of almost 30 years. The goal was achieved last year, but he left to join Olympiakos, where he assumed the role of technical director, with not much success if you consider the few “burnt” transfers and the huge number of players used during the season , plus the three coaching changes. The last with the flight of Mitchell, brought him to the bench, with the prospect of taking over the “red and whites” until they find the next chosen one, possibly until the end of the season.

Anigo’s adventures with the law did not end when he left France. New episodes appeared along the way, with a stormy plot reminiscent of a soap opera. In October 2020 when he was in Nottingham, a warrant was issued for his arrest on suspicion of being part of a criminal organization involved in drug, arms, body trafficking and extortion! He voluntarily went to Marseilles to testify, made himself available to the authorities, remained in custody for a while and started a new fight to clear his name from a case that started in football, but had other ramifications.

French police have arrested 23 people in connection with the case, with Capelette gang leaders Campanella and Barezi as key suspects, following an internal dispute over how the transfer money of an 18-year-old from Marseille’s youth team to Lille was split. The gang was embroiled in a number of heavy common criminal law cases, but the pulling of the sweater began when those affected by the split began to pin the police on those who took the lion’s share of the transfer. Anigo’s name was also involved in some (football) gear of the whole story, but the ball took him much more heavily in terms of impressions because the action of this mafia gang was in very dirty waters and not only in football…

Source: kathimerini.gr