Exclusive | Franck Leboeuf: ‘Habib Beye coming in is a good idea.’ | OneFootball

Get French Football News favourite Franck Leboeuf joined us for another interview, talking what makes Olympique de Marseille special, why Habib Beye could be a good fit, why RC Lens can win the title and how he thinks Liam Rosenior has settled at Chelsea. In this second part, he talks about how Roberto de Zerbi proved himself the wrong appointment, and why Habib Beye might be different.

I feel like Marseille are always appointing temperamental people like Jorge Sampaoli or Marcelo Bielsa or Roberto de Zerbi or even on the pitch with players like Mario Balotelli for example. Perhaps they should be looking more to steady characters like Didier Deschamps – I don’t think it’s a coincidence that last time they won the league it was with him in charge?

One has to be serious. Me, when I saw the game against Liverpool [Marseille lost 0-3 in the Champions League group stage] – you have to know how Marseille works to use that to your advantage. When you play against Liverpool in the Champions League and you try to play tiki tika, Guardiola-style, in Marseille, you clearly haven’t understood how the Marseillais people think. Especially when you know that Liverpool don’t like to be put under pressure, why play gentle build-up football when you know you should be playing “second ball” style? You need to get stuck in, work hard, apply pressure to make Virgil Van Dijk and the whole defence crack. That’s what’s been working this year against Liverpool. And you, you don’t do it. With 65,000 supporters who are ready to raise the roof. And that can’t happen. If you haven’t understood the atmosphere – like in Naples – if you haven’t understood the system, how the city functions, what makes the people tick, their state of mind, then you can’t work there.

Didier Deschamps who was the captain of the Marseille team who won the Champions League in 1993, he knows all that by heart, he knew how to use it to the team’s advantage – and even for him it was complicated at the end.

So for me, Habib Beye coming in is a good idea because he knows the club, he knows how it works. Will he succeed? Well at least he has all the tools and strengths to be able to achieve something. So it’s good that he’s joining – I think having an ex-Marsellais as coach is a very good idea.

Franck Leboeuf was talking to GFFN courtesy of BetVictor Online Casino

GFFN | Jeremy Smith