Lyon coach Fonseca after freaking out: Long lock threatens

Added time, Olympique Lyon leads 2-1 against Stade Brest at home. On the advice of the Var, referee Benoît Millot, 43, looks at the sidelines again whether his penalty whistle for Brest is justified by the pictures. When he wants to run back to the pitch to revise his decision, he sees a screaming, gesturing Paulo Fonseca, 51, the coach of Olympique Lyon. Millot decides to put him off the pitch. When he pulls out the red card, Fonseca starts him, builds up in front of him and moves closer to Millot’s face with his forehead until both noses touch briefly. Then Ol captain Corentin Tolisso intervenes and pushes his coach away for safety’s sake.

“He has this posture that he tries to move a blow to me, a head punch,” it describes in the interview with a few hours later in an interview The team“But I stay stoic, a bit because I’m so surprised, but above all so as not to put it back before this intimidation.” Fonseca’s outburst of violence, for which he apologized to the microphone after the game at DAZN, but which he did not want to go into, is already the second attempt at intimidation of a French club manager within a week.

On the previous match day, Olympique President Gautier accused France of referees of corruption

“Today we saw serious actions against the physical integrity of a referee,” writes Antony Gautier, the French referee chief, in The team. It was only on the previous matchday that there would have been an attack against “moral integrity” when after a 0: 3 defeat against AJ Auxerre Pablo Longoria, President of Olympique Marseille, accused the complete French referee of “corruption”. For this he had been blocked for 15 games.

Fonseca, who has only been in office at Lyon for five games (three victories, two defeats), expects a lock at least as long, the disciplinary catalog of the French football league is for “intimidating or threatening behavior” of a coach to the referee. The exact duration will be announced on Wednesday, Fonsecas 52nd birthday, and should also decide how his coaching career continues, or whether Lyon still has to look for a new coach for the rest of the season.