Boavista fans would have thought things could not possibly get worse. In early July, a month away from celebrating their 123rd anniversary, the former champions of Portugal, faced with liquidation, announced that the “special revitalisation plan” they had put together last November had been rejected by the Portuguese football federation: they had failed to provide the necessary tax and social security certificates and guarantees in time.
Riddled with debt (they owed €7m (£6.1m) to the construction company entrusted with the development of their stadium), they were so short of money that electricity had been cut off at their Estádio de Bessa in April after they failed to pay their bill. Players waited months to receive their salary. One of them, the US defender Reggie Cannon, whose pay was late in 28 of the 29 months he spent at Boavista, terminated his contract in the summer of 2023 and joined Queens Park Rangers. After an appeal at the court of arbitration for sport, it was announced last month that Boavista will have to compensate him to the tune of €400,000.
Even when Porto’s second club finished bottom of the Primeira Liga last season, supporters clung to the hope that the club would be allowed to regroup in the second division, but Boavista did not even try to appeal against the federation’s decision. They knew their race was run. They lost their professional status, were demoted to the fifth tier and are due to play in the regional Porto football association’s first division next season.
But Boavista hadn’t quite reached the bottom yet. Five days later, on 15 July, police officers used a battering ram to break into the club’s headquarters to seize documents, hard drives and computers. The suspicion was that at least six of the club’s executives, none of whom has been named, had engaged in tax fraud, credit fraud and money laundering. Boavista’s majority owner, the Spanish-Luxembourgian businessman Gérard López, is not one of the six defendants singled out by Portuguese police and no criminal charges have been pressed against him. Lawyers for López said he and the other current board members were the “alleged injured party”.
The executives singled out by police were thought to have embezzled an estimated €10m with the complicity of accountants, lawyers and auditors. The former club of Nuno Gomes, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Raúl Meireles may not only face relegation and bankruptcy but extinction.
There is a sense of deja vu about the catastrophe. It is not the first time that López, an early investor in Skype and the former owner of the Formula One team Lotus (whom he sold for a symbolic euro to Renault in 2015 after they faced bankruptcy), finds his name associated with a club’s demise, but the third.
His first foray into football ownership, in 2017, was with Lille, who finished second and fourth in Ligue 1 before ownership was transferred to the investment fund Elliott in the autumn of 2020. López had borrowed €225m from Elliott through a company based in the British Virgin Islands. Elliott, a US company, basically took control of Lille when López found himself incapable of repaying the loan.
This did not put an end to López’s ambitions in football. He set out to build his own multi-club football empire, targeting clubs who had fallen on very hard times. Lille’s partner club Royal Exclesior Mouscron were in Belgium’s top tier when López bought them in the summer of 2020, when it was known that his time at LOSC was coming to an end. It was a new beginning for The Hurlus: in this case, the beginning of an end which came very quickly. Mouscron were relegated in López’s first season. By December 2021, the club’s situation had become so dire that the players – who had not received their salaries on time – went on strike. By March 2022, Mouscron had been declared bankrupt by their own board. By the start of the 2022-23 season, Mouscron were no more. There is no representative club left in the Walloon town where the Moody Blues wrote Nights in White Satin and whose local football scene is mentioned in a later song, Top Rank Suite.
The next addition to López’s portfolio, in October 2020, were Boavista, who had been hit by a transfer ban because of their financial difficulties. More bans followed under the new ownership. Eight months later, it was Girondins de Bordeaux, one of France’s historically most successful clubs, where Zinédine Zidane made his name in the early 1990s, whom López acquired from the investment management firm King Street Capital for an undisclosed sum in July 2021. The Girondins were relegated to Ligue 2 the following season.
By 2024 Bordeaux, despite the sale of key players and of their women’s team, faced legal action from 400 unpaid creditors and were looking at their demotion to the third tier by the French football regulator, the DNCG. It turned out to be worse than that. López unsuccessfully tried to bring in new investors, including Liverpool’s majority owner, Fenway Sports Group. The club were put on sale, but no buyer declared any interest. At is stands, López remains the owner of Girondins, who will play in National 2, France’s amateur fourth tier, in the 2025-26 season.
Talking to L’Équipe, the DNCG president, Jean-Marc Mickeler, was scathing in his appraisal of what had happened in Bordeaux. He said the problems could have been avoided if the club had not had “too much debt, not enough equity, [and] over-optimistic projections based on qualification for the Champions League and regular player sales. We had warned about this from the beginning.”
Every time, be it in Belgium, Portugal or France, López had presented himself as the saviour who would turn round the fortunes of the clubs he acquired; every time, he failed and now he finds himself the ruler of an empire of dust.
