Benoît Bastien will referee the Classico this Sunday March 31. He will be on the whistle for this poster for the seventh time, and so far, the results are not to the advantage of the Marseillais.
This Sunday, March 31, the 107th Classico in history between Olympique de Marseille and Paris Saint-Germain will be held at the Vélodrome stadium. The clash between the leader of the Parisian championship and its Marseille rival promises to be intense, with a team led by Jean-Louis Gasset which has been doing better in recent weeks and efficient and undefeated Parisians on the road.
While waiting for the lineups for the clash, the referee has been announced by the LFP. It will be Benoît Bastien who will be on the whistle for the Classic, for the 8th time in his career. He will be assisted by Hicham Zakrani and Aurélien Berthomieu on the keys, by Marc Bollenger as fourth referee and by Jérémie Pignard and Hamid Guenaoui on video.
This announcement is not good news for the Marseillais. The players from the Marseille city have never won against PSG when the 40-year-old referee was in charge. He was even strongly criticized by former OM president Jacques-Henri Eyraud during the 2018 Classico. Mr. Bastien then canceled the equalizing goal of Kostas Mitroglou for a questionable foul on Marquinhos. In total, Marseille’s record is six defeats and one draw during the Classico refereeed by Benoît Bastien. He also refereed OM three times this season, for three defeats (!) against Monaco, Lens and Olympique Lyonnais. In total, the Parisians have a largely positive record when they are refereed by Benoît Bastien (35 wins, 6 draws and 6 losses), unlike OM (7 wins, 10 draws and 18 losses). It is still appropriate to put these figures into perspective with the overall results of the two teams. Indeed, Benoît Bastien generally referees the biggest matches, and OM have not performed much against the top Ligue 1 teams in recent years.
In addition to the referee, the list of absentees gives little hope to the Marseillais. Jean-Louis Gasset must indeed deal with numerous injuries, and will have to manage on Sunday without eight of his players: Bamo Meïté, Valentin Rongier, Amir Murillo, Samuel Gigot, Jean Onana, Pape Gueye, Ismaïla Sarr and Ulisses Garcia. A hard blow for the Marseille coach, who on the contrary imagined recovering players with the international break, “There are people in the locker room who deserve days of rest. We will recover, and we will try to ensure as best we can the final sprint, in the same state of mind that we had.”
