Amid a tumultuous season on and off the pitch for Angers, Ligue 1’s bottom-placed finishers saw more bad news come their way back in April when they were handed a transfer ban by FIFA over a dispute with Espérance de Tunis over the transfer of Ilyes Chetti last summer.
That ban, though, has now been temporarily lifted by the Court of Arbitration for Sport pending the team’s appeal. Les Scoïstes have announced that their request for the ban to be suspended for the time being has been accepted, and indicated that the decision is “fundamental for the coming season”, which they will spend in the second tier.
Chetti joined on a free transfer after terminating his contract with the Tunisian side – he was subsequently sentenced to pay his former side €970,000 and banned from football for four months, while Angers were not allowed to recruit any new players for the next two windows.
The left-back has now been dismissed by the club in any case, after being handed a four-month suspended prison sentence after pleading guilty to an instance of sexual assault back which took place in a nightclub back in December. When reports of the legal proceedings first emerged in March, then-Angers manager Abdel Bouhazama stunned his players with a team talk that appeared to downplay the events – “It’s nothing nasty. We all touched girls before”. He later left the club.
GFFN | Raphaël Jucobin
