Paulo Fonseca, the nine-month ban and the deepening crisis in French refereeing

Even at a time when the world of football has long grown wearily accustomed to displays of angry dissent from players and coaches, the video footage is shocking in its raw aggressiveness.

It was deep into stoppage time and Lyon were 2-1 up at home to Brest in Ligue 1 last Sunday when referee Benoit Millot was called to the pitch-side monitor to assess a penalty appeal for the away side. Satisfied that Lyon full-back Ainsley Maitland-Niles had not, in fact, committed handball inside the hosts’ area, Millot turned away from the screen at the Groupama Stadium and prepared to announce his decision.

Lyon head coach Paulo Fonseca had harangued Millot as he made his way towards the monitor for having overlooked what he perceived as a foul on one of his players moments earlier, pointing across the pitch and repeatedly shouting in English: “The first fault is there!”

The Lyon coach had already been booked for dissent towards the end of the first half. In footage subsequently released by Ligue 1’s refereeing management body, fourth official Thomas Leonard can be heard instructing Millot to show Fonseca a second yellow card for dissent and send him off.

Turning towards Fonseca, the short, shaven-headed official instead reached for a straight red card from his back pocket. As Millot raised the card in the air, Fonseca marched up to him and menacingly thrust his head into the referee’s face, furiously screaming abuse at him while the pair were nose-to-nose.

Millot told L’Equipe he feared Fonseca was going to headbutt him.

Shepherded away by Lyon captain Corentin Tolisso, Fonseca then turned back and strode towards the referee again, only to be fended off a second time by a combination of his centre-back Moussa Niakhate and the club’s black-clad security staff. Having stood calmly and motionlessly throughout Fonseca’s outburst, Millot returned to the pitch to announce his decision before seeing out the game’s final minutes.

A chastened Fonseca apologised for his behaviour immediately after the match, telling host broadcaster DAZN: “I just want to say that I apologise for this gesture. I shouldn’t have done it.”

The following day, he sent a formal apology by email to France’s refereeing bosses Antony Gautier and Amaury Delerue. But the damage had been done.

On Wednesday evening, the French league’s disciplinary commission announced that Fonseca would be suspended from the touchline until November 30 — a ban of nine months. Additionally, he will not be able to access the Lyon changing room before, during and after games until September 15.

The recommended sanction for such an offence in the disciplinary commission’s guidelines was a seven-month ban, but it opted for a nine-month suspension to incorporate the two-month summer break. Fonseca, who only became Lyon coach on January 31, has also been fined by the club.

In an unfortunate twist of fate for the former Roma, Lille and Milan coach, the punishment was announced on the evening of his 52nd birthday. Fonseca’s representatives were not prepared to comment when contacted by The Athletic.

Not since Paris Saint-Germain’s then-sporting director Leonardo was handed a 13-month ban for barging into match official Alexandre Castro in the Parc des Princes tunnel in May 2013 has a French club official been so severely reprimanded for an incident involving a referee. Leonardo’s ban was overturned by a French court five months later, by which time he had already left PSG.

Fonseca has received public support from Lyon owner John Textor. “I stand with you today and always,” the American wrote on Instagram. “You made a mistake. Your apology was sincere and your punishment is clearly too severe. You are the right man for OL and we shall persevere.”

Lyon said in a statement that the club was “studying all possible avenues of appeal”, citing the “extreme severity” of the punishment and accusing the disciplinary commission of proceeding with “unusual speed”. The club added that Fonseca had been guilty of an “emotional reaction” but “with no obvious intention of physically attacking the referee”.

Fonseca appeared before the French league’s disciplinary commission via a video call from the Lyon team hotel in Bucharest, where he was preparing for his side’s Europa League fixture against FCSB. Speaking after his pre-match press conference at the Arena Nationala, which took place an hour before his hearing, Fonseca revealed that he had been troubled in recent days by the uncertainty surrounding the future of Ukraine’s conflict with Russia following Donald Trump’s clash with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Fonseca has strong ties to Ukraine, having spent three years working there as coach of Shakhtar Donetsk, and several members of his Ukrainian wife Kateryna’s family still live in the country.

Fonseca at Wednesday’s pre-match press conference in Bucharest (Vasile Mihai-Antonio/Getty Images)

“They are very difficult days that leave a mark in my life,” Fonseca said in response to a question from a Ukrainian journalist. “I’m very anxious at the moment because Ukraine is in my life and in my heart. With what’s going on at the moment, I’ve been so tense.”

A source close to the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, said that although it did not excuse Fonseca’s behaviour, he had also been affected by being apart from his wife and two children, who remained in Italy following his dismissal by Milan in December.

In Lyon’s statement, the club said Fonseca’s punishment “seems to be dictated by a harmful context affecting French refereeing”. Coming at a time when relations between French club officials and referees are strained to breaking point, the Lyon coach’s meltdown could scarcely have been more poorly timed.

Just four days earlier, Marseille president Pablo Longoria was given a 15-match ban for accusing French referees of “corruption” after his side’s 3-0 defeat at Auxerre.

Enraged by referee Jeremy Stinat’s refusal to award Marseille a penalty for a supposed foul on Quentin Merlin and his dismissal of centre-back Derek Cornelius (two decisions that were subsequently assessed to have been fully justified by France’s Technical Refereeing Directorate), Longoria ranted that the championship was “rigged” and “s****y” and vowed: “If the Super League make us an offer, we’ll go straight away!”

Marseille President Pablo Longoria (Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images)

Longoria’s outburst prompted near universal condemnation, with French Football Federation president Philippe Diallo describing his accusations as “defamatory, unacceptable and reprehensible”. Longoria, who subsequently backtracked by explaining that the word ‘corruption’ had a “broader meaning” in his native Spanish language, will not be able to resume his role until September.

Stinat told regional newspaper Sud Ouest that he had filed a police complaint over death threats sent to him and his family in the aftermath of the game against Auxerre. A police investigation was also launched after Stinat’s wife reported that the tyres on two of the family’s cars had been slashed ahead of the match, although a local prosecutor said that no link had been established between the vandalism and the referee’s professional activities.

Mehdi Benatia, Marseille’s director of football, was already serving a three-month suspension for angrily remonstrating with Stinat when he was working as the fourth official during the club’s Coupe de France defeat against Lille, whose own president, Olivier Letang, was hit with a one-month ban for a similar offence during the same game.

Benatia had previously been given a three-match ban for lambasting referee Benoit Bastien over his decision to dismiss Marseille captain Leonardo Balerdi in the fifth minute of Marseille’s 3-2 league win at Lyon in September. Fabrizio Ravanelli, Marseille’s sporting advisor, was given a three-game ban for his conduct following the defeat at Auxerre.

Benatia with Ravanelli in the glasses (Franco Arland/Getty Images)

The latest example of hostility towards referees from a high-ranking French football official — albeit in European rather than domestic competition — occurred during PSG’s 1-0 defeat by Liverpool in the first leg of their Champions League last 16 tie at the Parc des Princes last night. After referee Davide Massa failed to punish Liverpool centre-back Ibrahima Konate for an apparent shove on Bradley Barcola, PSG sporting director Luis Campos was caught on camera berating the Italian official as they made their way down the tunnel at half-time.

France’s referees’ union, SAFE, announced its intention to sue Longoria for defamation over his outburst in Auxerre and representatives from within French officiating have continued to circle the wagons in the aftermath of Fonseca’s altercation with Millot.

Gautier, France’s director of refereeing, told L’Equipe: “What we’ve been going through in recent weeks is not acceptable.” For those involved in refereeing in France, there are profound fears about the potential consequences of the current situation.

“I’ve spoken to three or four referees this week and they’re disgusted and dismayed at the same time,” Tony Chapron, a Ligue 1 referee between 2005 and 2018, tells The Athletic. “There’s also a degree of disbelief. The worst thing is that, in each of the situations that provoked these incidents, there weren’t even obvious mistakes. The referees don’t understand what’s happening. It’s astonishing.”

Chapron is something of an expert on long suspensions himself, having once been given a six-month ban for deliberately tripping up Nantes defender Diego Carlos during a game against PSG in January 2018. But his concerns for his profession are heartfelt.

“It’s catastrophic for amateur referees,” he said. “Professional referees get some protection, but amateur referees are out there on their own every weekend. People should know that in France, we’ve lost between 3,000 and 4,000 referees over the last five or six years.”

Chapron finds the current situation astonishing (Damien Meyer/AFP via Getty Images)

According to a recent report by radio network Ici, the French Football Federation recorded 245 acts of violence against French referees last season and the total for the current campaign stands at 110.

With his suspension only concerning domestic matches, Fonseca is due to take charge of Lyon’s Europa League last-16 first-leg match against FCSB this evening. But there have been suggestions in the French media that, given the gravity of the offence, the FFF could ask FIFA to transform his sanction into a worldwide ban, which would banish him from the touchline in European competitions as well as the summer’s FIFA Club World Cup.

In his absence, it is expected that his assistant coaches, led by the former Chelsea full-back Paulo Ferreira, will take responsibility for Lyon’s forthcoming league games, starting with Sunday’s trip to third-placed Nice.

The situation is personally embarrassing for Textor, who enraged the club’s supporters by sacking popular homegrown coach Pierre Sage at the end of January, only to see the man he picked to take over banished from the dugout until this year’s advent calendars come out.

Justifying Sage’s replacement by Fonseca, who had lasted only six months at previous club Milan, Textor explained that Lyon would stand a better chance of qualifying for next season’s Champions League with the more experienced Portuguese coach at the helm. Fonseca arrived pledging to give the team a “solid defensive organisation”, but early league results under his stewardship have been mixed.

Lyon lost 3-2 to Marseille and PSG, enjoyed breezy wins over struggling Reims and Montpellier and then edged Brest in what now looks set to have been Fonseca’s final domestic assignment until December. His team are currently four points off Ligue 1’s Champions League qualifying berths in sixth place, which is one point further back than when Sage was dismissed.

From a broader perspective, it is another controversy that French football could have done without.

With France’s Professional Football League in the grip of a full-blown TV rights crisis over new domestic rights holder DAZN’s struggles to attract subscribers, Ligue 1 needs all the positive publicity it can get. Instead, yet again, it finds itself beset by grave problems that are entirely of its own making.

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(Top photo: Jeff Pachoud/AFP via Getty Images)