The coach is covered in blood, the match is cancelled: Marseille fans threw stones at the Lyon bus

Footage of the attack appeared on the Inter­net.

Sun­day’s match between Mar­seille and Lyon was can­celed due to an attack by Mar­seille fans on the vis­it­ing bus. As a result of the fans’ attack, the Lyon play­ers’ trans­port was dam­aged and their coach was seri­ous­ly injured.

The inci­dent occurred on the evening of Octo­ber 29. Mar­seille fans, who were wait­ing for the Lyon bus at the Vélo­drome sta­di­um, attacked him with stones and flares. They start­ed throw­ing cob­ble­stones at the car and broke the win­dows of the bus. The frag­ments hit the vis­it­ing coach Fabio Grosso, as a result of which the coach’s face was dam­aged.

Footage cir­cu­lat­ed on social media show­ing Grosso receiv­ing med­ical atten­tion. He received a seri­ous cut, caus­ing his head to fill with blood. Anoth­er casu­al­ty in the attack was Fabio’s assis­tant, Raf­faele Lon­go. Their wounds were treat­ed at the Velo­drome. It is cur­rent­ly unknown whether any of the play­ers were injured as a result of the attack.

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Short­ly after the inci­dent, a cri­sis meet­ing took place, fol­low­ing which the lead­er­ship of the French league decid­ed to can­cel the match. As a result, the game, which was sup­posed to take place at 22:45 Moscow time, was post­poned indef­i­nite­ly. It is expect­ed that the date and time of the new match will be announced lat­er.

Fran­cois Letex­i­er, the main ref­er­ee of the meet­ing, spoke about what hap­pened. He not­ed that after the inci­dent, Lyon did not want the game to take place. The can­cel­la­tion of the match will also be fol­lowed by the sub­mis­sion of reports to the “com­pe­tent author­i­ties,” the ref­er­ee added.

Some time after the attack, the Mar­seille press ser­vice issued an offi­cial state­ment. The club apol­o­gized for the inci­dent and said its man­age­ment regret­ted the “unac­cept­able inci­dents” that occurred at the Velo­drome. “The club wish­es a speedy recov­ery to Lyon coach Fabio Grosso and strong­ly con­demns aggres­sive behav­ior that has no place in the foot­ball world and soci­ety.”reads the appeal.

The press ser­vice also described the fans who attacked the bus as “a hand­ful of peo­ple who have lost their minds” who ruined the cel­e­bra­tion planned for Sun­day evening. Mar­seille expressed the hope that the resched­uled meet­ing will take place as soon as pos­si­ble and in the “best con­di­tions” at the Stade Vélo­drome.

By the way, this is not the first such inci­dent involv­ing Mar­seille fans. A sim­i­lar thing already hap­pened in 2019: then local fans also attacked the Lyon bus.