The end of the Ligue 1 season now in the hands of the State Council

• Lyon, Amiens and Toulouse have filed appeals before the Council of State over the Ligue 1 judgment and its consequences.
• The hearing was held this Thursday afternoon and lasted nearly three hours.
• Can Ligue 1 resume? Can it be played at 22 next season? The judge will make his findings early next week.

The end of Ligue 1 is therefore played out in court. For three hours, Thursday afternoon, in the litigation room of the Council of State, the Professional Football League (LFP) and its representatives confronted each other in Lyon, Amiens and Toulouse, the three clubs which have filed appeals against the way the French championship ended.

Each had come with their own requests. OL intends to resume the championship, arguing that our neighbors have shown that it was possible and that the 7th place at which the club finished had serious economic consequences. Amiens and the TFC do not dispute the stopping of the competition but the manner of establishing the classification and their resulting relegation.

"We know we are right" ... Amiens, the other L1 fighter https://t.co/MWx1tjpRej

As usual, Jean-Michel Aulas got his hands dirty by participating in the debates alongside his lawyer, unlike the Amiens president Bernard Joannin, who remained in the audience - his Toulouse counterpart Olivier Sadran was not present. The opportunity for JMA, boiling for two months, to throw a few pikes at its best enemy of the moment, the executive director general of the LFP Didier Quillot.

Aulas, indefatigable, said he was "dismayed" by the refusal of the LFP to consider a resumption, notably sparing with the lawyer of the League concerning the famous date of August 3, limit fixed by UEFA to finish the championship. Or not. "President Céferin wrote to me to tell me that your interpretation of this request is not correct," said the Lyonnais leader. "It was a" strong recommendation, "as they put it. So more than a wish, but less than an order, retorted the defender of the LFP. I do not see how we could have interpreted it differently. "

Responsibility for stopping the championship in the background

Me Poupot and Didier Quillot very much insisted on the sum of elements which went in the direction of a stop at that time, between the sanitary circumstances and especially the speech of Edouard Philippe of April 28, in which the Prime Minister "expressly cited football" by stating that professional sports could not resume.

A way to blame the government for stopping the championship, so the two sides have been passing the buck for the past few days. On Wednesday again, Sports Minister Roxana Maracineanu declared that the organization of the competition was up to the League. Didier Quillot recalled more than once that the body had only followed the words of the Prime Minister to the letter.

A Ligue 1 to 22 next season?

Behind the voluble leader of Lyon and the many voices of the League, Amiens was also able to make himself heard when challenging a relegation stemming from an "illegal and unjust decision". "The photograph taken by the LFP on the 28th day is blurred," said the club's lawyer, who was rather sharp.

"I speak freely, because the club voted against the interruption of the championship, is not concerned by the problem of the quotient and even less by the" strong recommendations "of UEFA," he said. Amiens is relegated, if I understood correctly, because of a sentence from the Prime Minister and UEFA recommendations which we wonder what they really are. How does all of this concern us? "

"Many wonder why you stopped Ligue 1 so quickly" https://t.co/VmL1LqHxNn

An outing that launched a discussion on the possibility of a white season or of playing an L1 season with 22 teams, and to which Aulas contributed, not being able to resist the temptation to place a small one on " the impartiality ”of the League's Board of Directors. "A certain number of presidents sitting there had a non-zero interest in stopping the championship," he said. Nicely said.

"We wanted to make the classification as fair as possible, knowing that it would be unfair"

“The League represents the general interest, that of the 40 professional clubs. We had before us three clubs which were there to defend their particular interest. We can understand them, but we could not make a decision other than this, "argued Quillot after the hearing. "We wanted to make the classification as fair as possible, while knowing that it would be unfair," had defended shortly before Arnaud Rouger, the director of sports activities at the LFP.

Can Ligue 1 resume? Can it be played at 22 next season? The second question is perhaps more open than the first. The judge in charge of the case, Bertrand Dacosta, asked the different parties to provide additional information on Friday to help him reach his conclusions. They will take place at the very beginning of next week, Monday 8 or Tuesday 9 June.

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• TFC
• Amiens SC
• OL
• Jean-Michel Aulas
• LFP
• League 1
• Soccer
• Sport