Phil Gifford Mourad Boudjellal: French bully
Would a DNA test show that Toulon rugby club owner Mourad Boudjellal and Donald Trump are twin sons of different mothers?
It’s true they don’t look alike at all, but when it comes to brutish bullying, threats, and public shaming of people they were once infatuated with, they might as well be joined at the hip.
Boudjellal, with Julian Savea, and Trump with just about everyone who doesn’t back him, have mastered the art of public contempt.
Insults? Boudjellal of Savea: “They must have swapped him on the plane. If I were him I would apologise, and go back to my home country.” Trump on his former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson: “Dumb as a rock, and lazy as hell.”
Threats? Boudjellal: “He (Savea) has a little more than a year of contract. It will be very hard for him.” Trump: “Lock her (Hillary Clinton) up.”
What the Boudjellal temper tantrum does illustrate is how the rush to private ownership of clubs in Europe (only Ireland kept central, rugby union run, contracting of players) has allowed ego maniacs like Boudjellal, to run clubs as their own fiefdoms.
All Black Andrew Mehrtens signed with Boudjellal at Toulon for a season in 2007.
“I have no animosity towards him,” he says now. “There are elements about him that are good. He was the son of Algerian immigrants, and I think he had it tough growing up. He comes from a macho culture. I read once he said his wrist watch was so expensive, he ‘had an apartment on my wrist’.
“For Mourad the thrill is like a kid playing in a fantasy football league. He loves signing the big names, the bigger the better.”
Mehrtens told me Boudjellal didn’t send a lot of time with the team. But when he was upset he would insist on talking to the players
in the changing room before a game.
“He’d come in and tell us we’re all shit, and that no matter what it cost him, if we didn’t win he’d rip up all our contracts, and we’d never play for another club in France.
“When I was there George Gregan was our halfback, and Mourad became obsessed with the fact George wasn’t scoring tries. George was playing really well, but Mourad seemed to think that because George was a big name, he should also be scoring tries all the time.”
Mehrtens feels that Boudjellal probably struggles with how today’s rugby, so fast moving players have to be constantly making decisions for themselves on the field, has moved on from the day when coaches were basically highly prescriptive, virtually dictatorial.
“Mourad tends to operate from a position of negative authority, which doesn’t work for a lot of people.”
It’s true the mega-wealthy takeover of European clubs has made a lot of imported players very rich. Some terrific perks also came with playing for an owner whose income is beyond a Kiwi’s imagination. John Kirwan tells a great story of how he and an equally amazed Craig Green, two wide eyed Kiwis playing in Italy in the late 1980s on their first OE, were flown by private jet to a test at Twickenham with the owner of their club, Benetton, Luciano Benetton, who founded the worldwide clothing company which was already making over $NZ1 billion a year.
On the other, the billionaires’ takeover of European rugby, by loading their sides with imports, has helped wreck the French national team, now plunging new depths like the record 44-8 loss to England at Twickenham.
The buyout has also made it virtually impossible for Pasifika teams to compete at test match level. If the northern hemisphere club team paying a Fijian or
Samoan player a huge wage doesn’t want him to attend a national training camp in the Pacific, he’s not going to.
Club owners like Boudjellal make it clear they don’t think a massive contract only buys the services of a player like Savea. They appear to believe they’ve bought the man himself.
Boudjellal’s money comes from publishing Marvel-style, super hero comic books. “They make people happy, and so does rugby,” he’s said, and he certainly can speak in cartoon bubbles. In
2012 he was banned from the sidelines for 130 days after comparing a refereeing decision that went against Toulon to being personally sodomised.
His Savea outburst is unconscionable on several levels. Boudjellal is famous for being hugely hands on with player contracts. He would have believed in 2018 that Savea was still playing like the superstar of the 2015 World Cup. The All Blacks and the Hurricanes had decided the opposite. You picked him, that Savea isn’t the player he once was is hardly Savea’s fault.
More importantly, whether it’s playing professional rugby, drawing comic strips, or digging ditches, every worker deserves the common decency of blistering criticism being made in private, not blurted out in public, which unleashes the on line demons.
Phil Gifford joins Simon Barnett on
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the new Newstalk ZB Afternoons show from June 2019