Pablo Longoria deplores “a very speculative market”

Released this week from the constraints of last season, Marseille is in full recruitment but is “facing a very speculative market”, President Pablo Longoria explained on Saturday on the club’s website. “We have targeted the positions we want to strengthen and those in which we need to improve. Right now we are dealing with a very speculative market,” he said.

“So we have our objectives but we have to remain consistent with this trend,” added the president. “This consistency must also be reflected in our game identity, with profiles of players determined to join us”. He also spoke of “a real logic of collective construction” with Jorge Sampaoli and his staff. Last month, the Argentinian coach, under contract until 2023, invited the leaders to be “sincere” about OM’s ambitions in Europe.

The club is targeting “two defenders, a big midfielder and a striker”

On Thursday, the DNCG, the financial policeman of French football, lifted the recruitment constraints imposed last year in the face of the club’s financial difficulties. Internally, the club says it is aiming for this summer’s transfer window “two defenders, a big midfielder and a striker”, while two indisputable holders, Boubacar Kamara (free party at Aston Villa) and William Saliba (return from loan to Arsenal), left the club. But another sword of Damocles weighs on the construction of the Olympian workforce: a possible ban on recruitment in the Pape Gueye case, at the heart of a dispute with Watford, which will be examined in October by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.