Parents can have a big say in the way that athletes behave and act. The upbringing can be a vital tool in life. It can be important for the attitudes that athletes display in life. Parents usually stay out of the picture in the professional sector. However, there are times when they enter the limelight. In the sports world, it usually for a bad reason.
Footballer, Adrien Rabiot's mom, Veronique Rabiot, has spoken out about her son's "unfair" treatment at French club, Marseille.
Even by the historically volatile standards of Marseille, the brief statement posted on the club’s website shortly before 18:30 local time on Tuesday came as a bolt from the blue. "Olympique de Marseille announces that Adrien Rabiot and Jonathan Rowe have been placed on the transfer list by the club," the statement read.
"This decision was taken due to unacceptable behaviour in the dressing room after the match against Stade Rennais FC, in agreement with the technical staff and in accordance with the club’s internal code of conduct. The decision was communicated to the two players by the club on Monday."
Rabiot, 30 and Rowe, 22, both made telling contributions to Marseille’s impressive second-place finish in Ligue 1 last season, the former as an exemplary first-team regular, the latter as an impact substitute.
Playing away at Rennes in the Friday night curtain-raiser to the Ligue 1 season, Roberto De Zerbi’s side dominated proceedings from start to finish but couldn't find a route to goal despite playing against 10 men for an hour following the 31st-minute dismissal of Abdelhamid Ait Boudlal. In the first minute of stoppage time, Rennes substitute, Ludovic Blas, ran through to score, giving the Breton side a smash-and-grab 1-0 win.
For Marseille, the trouble was only just beginning.
According to multiple reports in the French media, tempers flared in the visitors’ changing room when senior players including Rabiot and Argentinian goalkeeper, Geronimo Rulli, hit out at Rowe for a lack of effort on the pitch. Rabiot subsequently found himself in a sustained physical altercation with Rowe, during which the France midfielder struck the England Under-21 winger in the face. Amid the confusion, 17-year-old midfielder, Darryl Bakola, collapsed and had to be treated by the club’s medical staff. It took the intervention of security staff for order to be restored.
Sources at Marseille, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, said that other players in the squad were "shocked" by the level of violence involved in the altercation between Rabiot and Rowe.
De Zerbi expressed full support for the stance taken by the club in his weekly press conference on Friday. "In a place of work, you have two employees punching each other, as if they were in an English pub, with a team-mate on the floor because he’d lost consciousness," he said.
"What should an employer do in France? There are two solutions: either suspension or dismissal. I spoke to Mehdi Benatia and Pablo Longoria on the phone on Saturday and Sunday. We waited until Monday to announce a clear decision: suspending the players from the squad until we could see how they felt and whether they felt any remorse."
"In a football club as everywhere else, there has to be a hierarchy. It’s the club before everything. And before the players, it’s the coach and the club."
The decision to transfer-list Rabiot and Rowe, he said, was taken to "protect the institution and protect the season." The pair have been training separately from the rest of the squad since Monday.
Longoria, who became Marseille president in February 2021, said that the altercation between Rabiot and Rowe occurred at a time when he and his fellow directors were already harbouring concerns about the level of discipline within the squad. He revealed that he had felt compelled to issue a “call to order” to the players on three separate occasions, culminating in a reprimand about unpaid fines shortly before the game at Rennes.
In an interview with AFP, Marseille president Pablo Longoria described what had happened as “an incident of extreme seriousness and violence, something unheard of”.
"We had to take a decision after an incident that went beyond what is acceptable in a football club, as in any organisation,” the Spaniard explained. “Roberto De Zerbi has been coaching for 13 years, (director of football) Mehdi Benatia has been in top-level football since the age of 22 and I started in professional football at the age of 20. I think that the three of us have enough experience to say that we have never seen such a thing in a changing room."
Longoria clarified that he had not directly witnessed the incident himself because he is currently banned from the changing room after accusing Ligue 1 referees of “corruption” last season.
Benatia echoed Longoria’s remarks, telling RMC Sport: “It was chaos, I’ve never seen that. People might get worked up, but you can’t go as far as a physical attack, a punch in the mouth, security having to come in and split you up…” Benatia added that the two players had compounded their predicament by failing to apologise for their behaviour in the 48 hours following the incident.
It was already common knowledge that Marseille were open to offers for Rowe, who signed from Norwich City last summer on a season-long loan with a £17 million option to buy that the French club activated. The London-born player, who scored an extra-time winner for England in the final of this year’s Under-21 European Championship against Germany, has been filling in on Marseille’s left flank since Luis Henrique left for Inter but another Brazilian forward, Igor Paixao, has already arrived in a club-record €35m (£30.3m) deal from Feyenoord to take his place.
Rabiot’s lawyer, Romuald Palao, has accused Marseille of using his client’s altercation with Rowe as an excuse to force him out of the club. Rabiot’s two-year contract expires at the end of the season, meaning that he will be able to sign for a foreign club for free from January if Marseille can't sell him for a fee before the end of the current transfer window.
Rabiot’s mother and agent, Veronique Rabiot, does not deny that her son was involved in an altercation with Rowe but argues that it has been blown out of proportion.
"There was an altercation, that’s for sure, but the punishment is disproportionate," she told The Athletic. "In the history of football, when has a player ever been thrown out of a club because of an altercation in the changing room? You’d be throwing players out all the time."
"If it was so serious, why were neither of them injured? There were no broken noses, there were no split lips, there were no black eyes, there were no eyebrows cut open. Nobody went to hospital, there were no sick days. The claims are not credible. There was no, 'extreme, unheard of violence'."
She went on to say that Roberto De Zerbi has never been held accountable for the kind of behaviour he fosters in the club, highlighting that her son deserves a second chance given the Italian's vocal support of Mason Greenwood despite fan protests due to the charges of attempted rape and assault that the ex-Manchester United player faced before they were dropped in February 2023.
She has now accused Marseille of, 'betraying' her son over their decision to remove him from the club's first team. "When I learned about his suspension, it was like being struck on the head," she told RMC.
"It couldn't have just been because of that altercation. I feel uneasy because he has done so much for Marseille and yet this is how they treat him. Adrien is not angry, but very disappointed. De Zerbi talks about betrayal, but if anyone has been betrayed, it's Adrien."
"I never expected this to happen, I thought the worst was at PSG but I was wrong. If he misses an entire season, it will be catastrophic. 'We have already gone through this once and we don't want it to happen again."
The footballer's mother has been vocal and assertive throughout his career. She once described him as a 'prisoner of PSG', accusing the club of holding him 'hostage'. Further defending her son after the dramatic incident at Roazhon Park, Veronique compared Rabiot's situation to that of Mason Greenwood, asking De Zerbi to give the Frenchman a 'second chance'.
'When Mason Greenwood signed after hitting his girlfriend, De Zerbi said he could be given a second chance," she added. "I agree with giving people second chances, but would my son be the only one not entitled to one?"
Greenwood was charged with attempted rape, controlling and coercive behaviour while at Manchester United before prosecutors dropped the case in 2022. He restarted his career in La Liga with Getafe before joining Marseille last summer.
"I thought we’d already lived the worst with PSG." Furious and uncompromising, Véronique Rabiot has lashed out at Marseille after her son Adrien was placed on the transfer list. OM justified the decision by citing a locker-room fight with Jonathan Rowe, described as, "unbelievably violent." That wording infuriated the Rabiot family.
Speaking on RTL, Véronique hit back: "Not a single injury, no broken nose, no stitches… How can you call that 'unbelievably violent'?" She reminded listeners that both De Zerbi and Benatia were present in the dressing room during the altercation and insists the sanction is, "disproportionate and unfair"”
She didn’t stop there. The midfielder’s mother and agent fired directly at the club’s hierarchy: "Longoria and Benatia have oversized egos. They’re not in the right place and they don’t know how to control their emotions."
On De Zerbi’s claim of betrayal, Véronique countered: "The one who has been betrayed here is Adrien."
Pushing even further, she compared the chaos to the PSG saga in 2019: “I thought we had lived the worst with Paris — I was wrong. It would be a disaster if he doesn’t play for a full season.”
Veronique told La Provence: "What I can tell you is that I see the facts, the words 'unheard-of violence, extreme violence,' it's very, very strong, in general, it means that there are injuries. Here, as far as I know, there were no split lips, no broken noses, no shattered eyebrows. No one is injured, no one went to the hospital, there wasn't even a doctor's intervention."
"We know very well that this is completely false. There was no unheard-of violence, there was an altercation. What I can say, and then Adrien will give his version, is that at the beginning, it wasn't even between Rowe and him, but between Rowe and Geronimo. Pierre-Emile and Adrien came to separate them."
"And then it went freestyle. But all we heard... The coach who has never seen that, while he is always yelling and barking... And, then, he was shocked? There is nothing shocking, it happens in every locker room, it has already happened and it will happen again. The punishment is totally disproportionate . Everyone knows it, they are lying."
Marseille’s supporters could be forgiven a sense of deja vu after seeing their club once again respond to the starting gun by clattering into the season’s first hurdle. Marcelo Bielsa, one of De Zerbi’s comparably volcanic predecessors in the dugout, famously threw in the towel as head coach during the post-match press conference that followed a 1-0 defeat by Caen on the season’s opening day in August 2015.
His Argentinian compatriot, Jorge Sampaoli, resigned before Marseille had even started pre-season in 2022, while Spaniard, Marcelino, lasted only seven matches the following year, hurriedly handing in his notice after claiming to have been threatened during a meeting with the club’s supporters’ groups.
The Rabiot/Rowe affair has served to dent nascent hopes that the second act of De Zerbi’s Marseille tenure would be less turbulent than the first. Although it culminated in a creditable second-place finish behind PSG and a spot in this season’s Champions League, the former Brighton & Hove Albion head coach’s maiden Marseille campaign was frequently punctuated by flare-ups.
The Italian threatened to leave the club after a surprise home loss to Auxerre last November, clashed in training with Canadian midfielder, Ismael Kone (a scene captured by the club’s documentary series) and provoked a training-ground stand-off with his players following defeat at Reims in March.
I wrote pieces on both Mason Greenwood case and De Zerbi's outburst:
De Zerbi’s outbursts, which are often echoed by comparably provocative public pronouncements by Benatia, seem designed to keep the notoriously combustible club living in a permanent state of heightened tension. With ambitious promoted side Paris FC set to visit the Velodrome on Saturday — a game for which Marseille’s American owner, Frank McCourt, will be in attendance — and with the season’s first encounter with PSG already looming on the horizon in late September, the electricity levels seem unlikely to drop anytime soon.
I do agree that putting Rabiot on the transfer list because of a single fight is unfair. A suspension would suffice for me. It seems like an overreaction. I seriously disagree with the mom speaking out. Despite being the agent, that doesn't make a difference. Adrien Rabiot should've spoken for himself. It seems apparent to me that Adrien definitely inherited his mom's behaviour.