Angers SCO are slowly moving towards Ligue 2. For Saïd Chabane, its resigning president, the end of the season could be tougher than the diabolical on-pitch performances that his club has produced in the French 1st tier this season. In June, he goes on trial for sexual assault. A recent So Foot investigation into the club has exposed a climate of paranoia perpetrated by Chabane. This is a tale of suspicion, espionage and intimidation.
Note: all quotes in this piece are derived from investigative work completed by the So Foot team – Get French Football News takes no responsibility for the authenticity of the content.
Pre-season camps offer all professional football clubs a get-away before the start of the regular action. For a long time, Angers SCO’s location for their pre-season camp was on the Atlantic coast, in Les Sables-d’Olonne, a thalassotherapy hotel facing the ocean. The camp ends with a traditional friendly match between the staff of the club and the staff of the establishment, made up of waiters, cooks and cleaning staff. President Saïd Chabane participates in this game, in his own style. Sunglasses on his nose, he attempts to make his on-ball technique speak for itself.
A regular participant in the friendly match had the following to say on Chabane’s performance in-game:
“He’s a clown on a football pitch. When you see him with a ball, you say to yourself: “This game is going to be cumbersome.” It is not f***ed up to double-take.”
Before one of these friendly matches, the president was injured during the warm-up. On another year, he, by some miracle, scores a goal. His staff does all the work in move construction, an assistant of his eliminates the opposition defence with a pass before serving a the ball up on a plate for Chabane in front of the empty goal. Very happy, the president congratulates his troops for the move: “Thank you for the defensive pass!”
His teammates wince: “The pass what?” Chabane insists: “Well, the defensive pass.” It encapsulates his lack of understanding of the footballing world for someone who has been at the club for the last 12 years.
It must be said that nobody had really envisaged Chabane becoming the head of a football club. In 2011, he was just one shareholder among others in the capital structure at SCO – a club that at that point was on the downturn. The then president, Willy Bernard, is at the time accused of embezzlement. In May 2011, a few weeks before his trial for various financial offences which ultimately earned him a two-year suspended prison sentence, he gave himself a last hurrah and organised his wedding in Marrakech. At the sidelines of the reception, he summoned a handful of entrepreneurs and shareholders, including Bertrand Baudaire, the CEO of La Boucherie restaurants, who was tipped to take over the keys to the club. Attending this side-bar of a meeting is a discreet guest: Saïd Chabane.
He was then 46 years old and headed up the Cosnelle industrial charcuterie group based in La Ferté-Bernard, in Sarthe. Present at the wedding as a friend of Willy Bernard, Chabane took part in all the discussions on the future of Le SCO. He developed a growing interest, attended training and even travels to watch the team, like on September 9th 2011 when Angers went to Monaco for the 6th match of the Ligue 2 season and won 3-1 at the Stade Louis II.
“That’s where he falls in love with it all. The light, the atmosphere, he is dazzled,” noted Anthony Tondut, former Angers doctor, during a recent legal proceeding. On November 24th, he formalised his takeover of 60% of the share capital, installed himself as president and promised a heavy-handed management style at his first press conference, declaring: “In my group, there is only one thing that I do not control and that is the purchase of toilet paper.”
As promised, Saïd Chabane begins meticulously: “When he started, he was ubiquitous. He checked everything. Pharmacy bills, bills to buy highlighters for secretaries. You had to get him to sign-off on everything,” recalls an employee.
When ascending to the Angers presidency, Chabane had no prior football experience to call upon, apart from a passion for a team called Le Mans Union Club which ended up being placed in compulsory liquidation and demoted to the Division d’Honneur in 2013. During his first years in the president’s chair, he observes, leaves the key staff in place and attempts to learn how a football club works.
A weakness within the club jumped out at him: the dilapidated infrastructure. Built in 1989, the La Baumette training center was not worthy of a Ligue 2 club. In the showers, the hot water was intermittent, and the offices did not have heating. Saïd Chabane and his general manager Olivier Pickeu visited the Domaine de Luchin – Lille’s training ground – and decided to attempt to replicate it in Angers. They design an identical operating circuit, with a dressing room arranged in the same way, similar lockers and a similar weights room. The training centre was inaugurated in February 2014. The team was still in Ligue 2, but this training complex was a first major victory for President Chabane.
Following this scene, Chabane attempted to install himself as the all-seeing eye at Angers. Behind the entrance gate of the training centre, there are two pylons with surveillance cameras on top of them. One, on the left, which films the entrance to the dressing rooms and the main training pitch. The other, opposite, catches the slightest movement towards what everyone at the club calls “the pit”, namely a synthetic field. Several former employees claim that Saïd Chabane has shown them the video feed from these cameras which he looks at on his own smartphone.
“It’s his great game, he showed it to me several times. He’s on his phone and he watches what’s happening on the training ground, he follows the players, he sees the cars. It’s: “I want to control everything, I want to see everything,” a former employee told So Foot.
The head office of the Cosnelle company and the premises of the SCO are separated by 140 kilometers. Saïd Chabane was only present a few days a week in Angers, the rest of the time he observed the club from a distance to let it be known that nothing escapes him. A former employee recalled receiving a text message from the president asking him what he was doing at La Baumette on a Sunday at 13:00.
Another day, after training, part of the staff decided to have a little game on a field. At the final whistle, everyone’s phones blow up – it’s the president. “As soon as we’re done, he calls us: “Guys, it’s not a party here. You are not there to play football, otherwise I will charge you for (using) the pitch,” recalls a source. In a report broadcast in 2011 on France 3 Pays de la Loire, Saïd Chabane was interviewed on the premises of his delicatessen business. On the desk, in the background, sat a screen that broadcasted live about twenty surveillance cameras. He seems to have a passion for them.
At the premises of the SCO, his office opened onto large bay windows that overlook the lawns. Leather sofas furnished the room and, in a corner, there was a mini fridge installed in which were stacked bottles of Ruinart Blanc de Blancs champagne. It has been reported to So Foot that when an employee entered the room for a discussion that was set to be animated or controversial, Saïd Chabane closed the door and placed the telephone of the individual he was meeting with in a fridge or a cupboard in order to protect himself from secret recordings. Mistrust would sometimes go further than that. “We wondered if there weren’t microphones in the ceilings,” wonders a former member of staff.
Conversations held in a room, with a select committee of individual, would often be repeated verbatim by the president. Former staff members say they had discussions in the boot room, a small bubble between the exit of the 1st team building and the grounds, “because they feared the microphones,” claims a former employee.
This feeling of general mistrust has been rising year after year. Stéphane Garson, President of the 100 Ties club, an association of 100 partnered entrepreneurs with Angers, says that he witnessed strange scenes followed by peculiar decisions that were often taken in retaliation. “A supplier would make some comments and two days later, he was no longer a supplier. Comments made during our private parties are immediately transmitted to the president. There was a kind of wicked spirit. There was a surveillance system, a form of military police. It has become institutional in the club. It’s bullshit paranoia,” affirms this particular entrepreneur.
In the offices of Angers, employees looked up at the ceilings with suspicion, as if in fear of seeing hidden microphones contaminated by spirits. Men were seen in the middle of the night on a ladder manipulating cables in the false ceilings. A former employee adds: “When we wanted to negotiate our contracts, we spoke out loud while looking at the ceiling to make the others laugh: ‘Here, I’m going to go ask for a raise.’ We never had the balls to go and take down the ceilings to see if there was something. Are we the ones being paranoid or are some really weird things going on?”
It was yet another trip to Monaco that marked a turning point. On February 4th 2020, Stevan Jovetić scored the only goal of the match for the Monégasques. Angers lost and got stuck in 13th place in the standings. A defeat has been known to energise Saïd Chabane. In the dressing room, they feared an angry reaction on his part. He is known to throw fits of fury to knock down everything that comes across his path: “He takes everything that’s in the cupboards, he throws everything on the floor. If there is elastic or tubes of cream, he knocks everything down, throws everything on the ground. Like a kid having a tantrum,” described a former employee about Chabane’s regular post-match fits of rage.
This time, vs Monaco, no reaction. The president was apathetic. Without reaction. He seemed without life throughout the return trip to northern France. In the middle of the night, when the team finally landed on the tarmac at Angers airport, the staff saw Saïd Chabane take aside his coach, Stéphane Moulin, and his general manager, Olivier Pickeu. He tells them that in a few hours, he will be taken into custody for sexual assault. “From there, he was twisted. There was a clear break. He was no longer the same man,” affirms a witness.
The public prosecutor of Angers, Éric Bouillard, indicated in a press release that Saïd Chabane is indicted for “sexual assaults committed by a person abusing his authority conferred on him by his functions,” and adds: “Four women working or having worked at the Angers football club were identified as potential victims,” before concluding that “Mr. Chabane maintains that he did not commit the seven facts or series of facts for which he is being prosecuted.” Contacted through the club’s communications manager, Mohamed Sifaoui, Saïd Chabane, presumed innocent of the charges against him, did not wish to answer So Foot’s questions. He told them through his lawyer Bernard Benaiem: “The questions you intend to ask him relate to things of a certain gravity that he fully disputes and the defamatory nature of which is beyond doubt.”
Before these accusations, his attitude with women inspired astonishment from those around him. “He is very tactile with girls, while he is not at all with men,” noted a witness. “No woman is comfortable around him. He is a powerful person who knows all the entrepreneurs in the sector. To reject him is to close a lot of doors,” stated Hélène Chapelet, a former journalist at Angers Télé, a local channel bought by Saïd Chabane.
The engineer by training acquired several companies, including Nivernoy, Valansot and Prestige de la Sarthe, respectively specialising in blood sausage, sausage and rillettes. Since taking possession of Angers, Chabane ventured out of charcuterie business to buy companies that were far removed from his core business: L’Orfèvrerie d’Anjou and Angers Télé. According to several witnesses contacted by So Foot, the president would often make ambiguous statements and uncomfortable gestures towards the female staff.
A former employee assured So Foot that he took her hands and did not let go of them during an entire meeting that is said to have taken place on the sofa in his office, with the door closed. He is alleged to have asked her: “Are you going to send me pictures of your room?” He is then alleged to have stated: “You know, I have four wives, you could be the fifth.”
In a document submitted to court that So Foot was given access to, a former employee allegedly claims to have received a text message from a very close collaborator of Saïd Chabane who describes the president as “a predator” and specifies that “these kind of guys shouldn’t get away with it.”
Outside of the companies that he owns, Chabane is alleged to cause the same level of discomfort. Management at a local fitness centre affirms to have had a conversation with a beautician who no longer wished to be left alone with Saïd Chabane when working out.
There are similar tales from a thalassotherapy centre at the Sables-d’Olonne, where Angers historically undertook a portion of their pre-season:
“We know that there is something that went on there between him and the beauticians and masseuses. The girls complained. The director of the centre had forbidden the women to respond to his request,” according to a former Angers employee contacted by So Foot.
The centre was contacted by So Foot for comment – the manager of the centre, Sylvie Dubreuil, responded:
“We indeed had the pleasure of welcome Angers SCO and on several occasions. We have no specific comments to add.”
Since the breaking down of the relationship between Angers and the thalassotherapy centre, the club has moved their pre-season camp to a hotel on the Ile de Ré.
Before 2020, Chabane’s behaviour appears to have been mostly tolerated and ignored owing in part to the fact that the on-pitch results were pleasing, with Angers regularly maintaining itself in Ligue 1. The team has been in the French top flight since 2015. Chabane was named football executive of the year in 2019 by France Football magazine. Each season, the club’s player recruitment staff were signing young talents cheaply and selling them on for big prices: Nicolas Pépé, Karl Toro Ekambi, Baptiste Santamaria, Jeff Reine-Adélaïde. The list goes on. Under ever-present head coach Stéphane Moulin, the heights included a Coupe de France final vs PSG in 2017, which they only lost 1-0.
This cup final occurred in the Stade de France – Angers President Saïd Chabane got to rub shoulders with PSG supremo Nasser Al-Khelaïfi and French President Emmanuel Macron. For Chabane, a native of Algeria who arrived in France at the end of the 1980s, this level of recognition will have meant something for the now disgraced executive. That is a sentiment shared by Bernard Guérineau, the boss of a local deli business who hired Chabane into his company in 1993 and was convinced to do so by “an extremely brilliant man in business. He is a good success story of integration, he made up an ethnically mixed couple (with his wife Isabelle), which was not common in La Ferté-Bernard. It is not impossible to think that he was the victim of racism when he first arrived in France… I was in the Algerian war with the colonial paratroopers and his father was in the FLN (pro-Algeria independence force). I told him that I could have come across his dad on the battlefield.”
To his relatives, now President of Ligue 2 side SM Caen, Olivier Pickeu, often summarises the day of March 10th 2020 in the following way: “I was fired in 5 minutes after 14 years of work.”
Pickeu held the dual role of General Manager and Sporting Director at Angers since 2006. Pickeu had been considered to be the be the brain of Angers, the architect of the economic and sporting plan which catapulted the club into the French football elite. He was laid off as a precaution on March 10th 2020, a few days before the announcement of the first COVID-19-induced lockdown, and did not learn of the news from Chabane, but from Fabrice Favetto-Bon, who had been appointed as deputy president of the club… the day before: “I arrived at 8:30 a.m., they say to me: “Do you know? Oliv’ just got fired. It was like an earthquake,” stated an individual connected with the club to So Foot. The guy who arrived the day before fired the guy who built the club, but Chabane was apparently hiding. This surprise decision marked the end of a relationship that had become toxic between two men whose hatred for each other had been simmering for several years, fuelled by a mixture of ego and mutual mistrust.
Garson adds that what followed after Pickeu’s exit was a “purification” on the sporting side – through the departure of all those who were close to him: assistants, scouts and medical staff. A considerable number of these individuals have now reunited with Pickeu at Caen.
Pickeu’s exit gave Chabane the opportunity to take more power – one witness puts it as follows: “Football makes monsters.”
Chabane often boasted about his football talent identification abilities despite having no competency in the area of player recruitment. In September 2017, he promised many at the club that Youcef Belaïli was going to arrive at the club and prove to be a “super player.” Belaïli has been at both Brest and AC Ajaccio this season but his time with the first of the Ligue 1 struggling outfits came to an end after he went missing and refused to return to training. He attempted the same trick at Ajaccio recently but was eventually convinced to return after initially refusing to return from Algeria after the March international break.
A former member of staff explains Chabane’s obsession with Belaïli: “Chabane told me: “In a month, he will start at the Parc [des Princes] and get the winner against PSG. The guy arrives with two crutches, a hugely inflated knee and turns up wearing a t-shirt with cannabis leaves on it.” Belaïli had just come out of a two-year suspension from playing professional football after testing positive for cocaine.
The other two “big coups” that Chabane notably went for were French goalkeeper Paul Bernardoni – who Angers signed for €7.5m in June 2020 – a former Angers employee commented on the deal: “no other club would have offered that much.” The second was Sofiane Boufal, who arrived 4 months later than Bernardoni and was 4kg overweight, injured and had a few slightly odd demands: “Boufal wanted to have his own room for each way did. Moulin didn’t want this,” recalls a former employee. “But nobody was allowed to knock him down a peg. We could have, except that no, Chabane was protecting him.”
Another witness added: “The President was aware of the power and aura around players, and does not necessarily treat them in the same way as he treated other employees.”
The exit of those loyal to Pickeu was followed by the exodus of those close to the individuals who accuse Saïd Chabane of sexual assault. In a legal proceeding which she initiated against the club, a former employee depicts a climate of terror:
“Either we supported Angers, or we were against it.” She also affirms that Angers executives “required her to provide a list of all the players on the 1st team with whom a complainant allegedly had sexual relations… clearly seeking to denigrate and discredit the complainants.”
Chabane responded to the allegations by doing nothing – he remained in his position in the club and continued to practice an increasingly autocratic style.
Another former employee explains: “He loves to publicly humiliate people. He had already told me: “You have no right to speak. It’s me who speaks you are silent.”” Another goes further: “He put pressure on all his employees. He spied on the people who came to my house, which shows how sick he is.”
Following the sexual assault allegations – Chabane’s paranoia increased and he decided to hire his brother, Salim Chabane, as the Director of Sports Facilities and Security. One particularly disgusted employee explained his reaction to this development:
“He is ultra-dangerous, super aggressive. He says to you: “On such and such day you went to the restaurant, at such and such time, with this person, and you denigrated the president. Everything that happens in Angers, I know about it, I know about it. To guys at the football club, he turns up on Monday morning: “I know you were in a nightclub on Saturday night, that you were drunk and that you even tore your shirt.”
Another ex-employee of the club says he received an intimidating text sent by an unknown number. The spouse of one of his colleagues claims to have been followed in the street every day and that she eventually ended up recognising Salim Chabane, who regularly wears the club’s tracksuit.
The number of people that the president trusted followed the same trajectory as the recent footballing results of the team: in free-fall. Among them remains Morgan Potier, the deputy director, and Abdel Bouhazama, a coach who took over after the departure of Gérald Baticle in December 2022 and who did not respond to So Foot‘s request for an interview. Bouhazama has since been suspended and sacked after allegedly telling players “It’s nothing nasty. We all touched girls before,” when asked about the latest allegations against Chabane.
Other confidants of Chabane include: Jalal Benalla, a former judoka whose job is to “follow” players and was involved in the arrivals of Mohamed-Ali Cho, Batista Mendy and Bilal Brahimi. Last September, he officially joined the SCO recruitment department, three months after being investigated in a dubious player transfer scheme, which had resulted in a search of the premises of the club offices but in which no charge had ultimately been brought against him.
“In terms of law, I have the right to work with any club,” specified Jalal Benalla, who claimed to have collaborated within the framework of an “agreement with Angers, a bit like Luis Campos does with the PSG.”
However, a person close to the club told So Foot that Benalla is said to have made phone calls to several players to make them understand that he now had the role of Sporting Director and that it was necessary to go through him rather than through Laurent Boissier to extend a contract or leave the club, with the latter officially having the role that Benalla claimed to have. This is an allegation that Benalla firmly denies: “I worked in collaboration with Laurent and it was going very well.” Here again, the story was cut short: he left Angers last January. “It was me who left, I wanted to move on to something else,” he says.
In the league, Angers SCO sit in last place and almost certainly will be one of four relegated teams in a special Ligue 1 campaign which sees the division drop down from being a 20-team to an 18-team league. Saïd Chabane was one of the presidents that voted in favour of the transition to 18 clubs in Ligue 1. “All his Ligue 2 friends consider him to be a motherf***er,” laughs a former close friend of the president speaking to So Foot.
“Chabane’s problem is that everything worked out for him. Every year he performed. We never faced relegation. He never had to fire a coach.” On a Tuesday morning earlier this month, he was placed in police custody by the judicial police of Nanterre, where he was made to answer questions as part of an investigation opened in Bobigny relating to “organised money laundering” and “working illegally as a football agent,” according to Le Parisien.
Saïd Chabane’s son, Romain, is currently leading the club, following the former’s resignation. What a wonderful world.
| GFFN
