Fabien Barthez was attacked by his own team's fans in the club car park following Saturday's 2-0 defeat to Rennes which virtually condemns les Canaris to Ligue 2 for next season. The slippery slaphead has, subsequently, decided to leave relegation stricken Nantes with immediate effect as his work there is done. Rudi Roussillon, the Nantes president, reckons that Barthez had been "traumatised" and had "gone to find some comfort with his family" following the episode in which five fans tried to pull him from his car following ninety minutes of anti-Barthez chanting from sections of the club's fans.
We do not condone violence but Barthez has made a career of brinksmanship both in his on and off field endeavours and his attitude to risk was always likely to result in confrontation with someone at some point. As we have previously posted (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/02/yo-eo.html), Barthez has continued his historical match manipulations since coming out of retirement for an extra little earner at Nantes.
All professional analysts were aware of the foibles of Barthez when Ferguson made the error of signing him for Manchester United - we could itemise numerous matches at Marseille where his performances were closely correlated to suspicious patterns in the betting markets. His behaviour continued at Old Trafford and he was directly responsible for several interesting outcomes in major televised games before his absolute non-performance for United in their 6-5 aggregate loss to Real Madrid in the Champions League Quarter Final in 2002/03 which finally persuaded Sir Alex to grab the axe (check out the man's "efforts" to prevent Ronaldo's hat trick).
During his time in Manchester, Barthez was a bit of a fixture in the city's casinos. Indeed, there were jokes at the time that he undertook his match training at the poker tables. When our Trading Team assess the corrupt players within the game, it is surprising how frequently an interest in casinos/gambling forms part of the psychological profile. Inevitably, if one mixes with the crooked it becomes more likely that one's reality becomes warped to a lowest common denominator level.
There are two varieties of player that put betting market activities ahead of their professionalism - the solo operator and the player who acts adjacently to bookmaking organisations. It is significantly more likely that players who socialise with market makers are eventually going to be owned by them whether such ownership be related to a shared strategy or a power gradient often related to blackmail (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/04/its-queer-up-north.html). The bookmakers particularly target goalkeepers due to the enhanced impact of a goalkeeping error on the outcome of a match. Additionally, fans seem to have decided (probably quite correctly) that goalkeepers must be a little eccentric and, consequently, nicknames like "the clown" (Bruce Grobbelaar) and "calamity" (David James) may be utilised to disguise the keeper's hidden agendas. As regular readers will be aware, the layers do not solely target goalkeepers but outfield players must be critical to a team's success if their underperformance is to have the desired effect. Leisure traders often make the error that one criminalised player merely results in a team playing a man light but this simplicity undervalues the collective impact of a corrupt insider. When a forward is owned by the bookmakers, his lack of effort effectively removes the other forward(s) from the game and a "quarterback" midfielder can break up all of a team's attacks with ease resulting in a far greater impact on match outcome. In addition to positional priorities, the bookmakers also aim high with respect to the quality of the player - there evidently being little to gain from owning an infrequently used substitute right back, for example. Barthez, like David James, is at the very top of his profession when he acts honestly which is one of the factors that makes it so simple for analysts to determine the manipulators - excessive variation in match performance correlated with betting patterns is always a worrying sign with regard to integrity.
A corrupt player has two prime non-betting concerns. Firstly, the player must maintain a profile that ensures his place in the team and, secondly, the player must convince the fans. Barthez has repeatedly fallen short of these targets throughout his career simply because he pushes it too far. Barthez operates to a standard template. When he first arrives at a club or on the arrival of a new manager, he cements his place in the team prior to undertaking his corrupt activities. The data below relates to his period at Nantes this season in Le Championnat games together with external breakpoints (the figures in brackets relate to goals conceded/shots on target).
Nantes 1 Nice 0 - (0/2)
Troyes 1 Nantes 0 - (1/9)
Barthez falls out with manager Georges Eo over having to attend training.
Nantes 0 Lorient 2 - (2/5)
Nantes 2 Valenciennes 5 - (5/8)
Georges Eo sacked.
Marseille 0 Nantes 0 - (0/9)
Nantes 1 Auxerre 1 - (1/6)
Sochaux 1 Nantes 2 - (1/5)
Nantes 2 Nancy 1 - (1/4)
Monaco 2 Nantes 1 - (2/2)
Barthez substituted after dreadful error in Sedan game.
Saint-Etienne 2 Nantes 1 - (2/9)
Nantes 0 Lens 0 - (0/1)
PSG 4 Nantes 0 - (4/7)
Nantes 0 Rennes 2 - (2/7)
Comparing Barthez's performance in the games where he is focused on positive performance as opposed to other external concerns is revealing. Barthez has let in six goals from 45 shots on target when he has his professional hat on and fifteen goals from 29 shots on target when he is otherwise engaged. There is evidently a slight differential between 13% and 52% shot-to-goal ratios. We could back up our argument with details from certain betting markets but our legal people have said "non".
We advised readers to short sell Nantes as soon as Barthez arrived at FC Nantes Atlantique and further emphasised our opposition when Michel Der Zakarian replaced Eo. We hope that this tawdry episode is the final occasion that Barthez is able to enhance his bank balances at the expense of the fans, his teams and the game.
