Paris (AFP)

Journalist, player agent, then boss of OM and candidate for mayor of Marseille, Pape Diouf had multiple lives until his death Tuesday from the consequences of the coronavirus, which mourns a club where his frankness and his literary verve had won over the supporters.

Stayed four years (2005-2009) at the head of Olympique de Marseille, one of the most ejectable positions in French football, the Franco-Senegalese put the hot ultra Olympians in the pocket with his uncompromising defense of the club and its policy of successful reconstruction after years of failure.

Pape Diouf, born in 1951 in Abéché (Chad) where his military father was stationed, arrived in Marseille at 18 years old and died Tuesday at the age of 68, it was first of all a middle height tu the meter eighty -ten.

It was also an elegance, with its eternal dark mustache on its broad smile, its suits and its matching ties, as well as its posed voice handling the emphasis and the irony, especially to slay its media adversaries: the Paris SG, well sure, but also his detractors within the club, who nevertheless ended up being right in 2009.

His sense of formula, cared for on the bench at Sciences Po Aix, has often hit home, adding to the decorum of a French championship where the Marseillais, weaned from victories, needed to find reasons to dream.

He criticized, for example, the Coupe de la Ligue, an unloved trophy in French football, calling her a "little dancer" not essential in an overloaded calendar.

- The province against Paris -

And to better seduce the supporters, the former sports journalist of La Marseillaise who later became the agent of several players of the France team and finally manager of OM for a season before assuming the presidency, often played the province against Paris.

"In Marseille, there is turbulence, sometimes overflows and some excesses. But there is no hatred or stubborn stubbornness, he had said. There is no nasty audience here, sometimes hateful as we can see in Paris ", he launched in 2008 before a shock against the PSG, qualifying certain ultras of the Parc des Princes as" stadium brigands ".

Later, he defended the preconceived ideas against the second largest city in France and his club: "Marseille is a city that must always be hit. If all the clubs in France were the object of the same attention as OM , you would see many more clubs in the offices of judges, "he said in 2014 when he was worried in the case of alleged fraudulent transfers of OM, before having his indictment canceled four years later.

In return, Marseille supporters defended him tooth and nail at the time of his departure from the presidency, after four years marked by a sporting recovery in which he will have only missed a title of champion, finally won, under the mandate of his successor Jean-Claude Dassier, in 2010.

- Fight against racism -

This popularity rating, Diouf even tried to make it bear fruit in politics, running for mayor of Marseille in 2014 at the head of a citizen collective.

"I want to turn my back on any political approach because when a lamppost is broken, it is neither left nor right to try to repair it," he said then. This rather anchored figure on the left will only collect around 6% of the votes, but his image will remain unscathed in the eyes of the people of Marseilles, like a Bernard Tapie.

His freedom of tone also led him to fight against racism, especially during the so-called "quota" affair, when the abandoned idea emerged of imposing binational quotas on young people, during a meeting of the National Technical Directorate (DTN) at the end of 2010.

"I am the only black president of a club in Europe. This is a painful observation, like European society and, above all, French, which excludes ethnic minorities," he said in the columns of the Jeune Afrique magazine.

© 2020 AFP