The day before Olympiacos hosts Real Madrid (9pm, Movistar), the second hearing of the macro-trial for the 2023 death of a police officer due to a rocket launch during an Olympiacos-Panathinaikos women’s volleyball match was scheduled in Greece. Among the almost 150 defendants is the club’s president, Evangelos Marinakis, accused together with four other managers of two crimes: incitement to violence in football with statements against the authorities and support for a criminal group between 2019 and 2024. The leader accused the government of plotting blackmail to silence him. So far, this 58-year-old man has come out clean, and has had several serious ones. In 2018 he was acquitted in a match-fixing case, and in the past his name has been mentioned in serious incidents such as the bombing of a referee’s bakery and in a drug trafficking investigation, according to information gathered by the BBC.
Marinakis is an excessive type of everything. For his overwhelming physique, for the scandals that plague him, for his outbursts (“You don’t even deserve toilet paper in the city of sports,” he told the team in 2018 after several bad results), for his 24 coaching changes since 2010, for his publicized philanthropy and even for extravagances like being a musical lyricist. “I feel a shiver go through my body when I see you, you become a silent scream,” he wrote in the song Exapsi (Excitement), by local performer Natasa Theodoridou.
He is one of those characters who still inhabit Greek football, perhaps not as extreme as the PAOK president who took to the pitch with a gun in 2018, but who attracts attention in places like England. There he has been a starter for Nottingham Forest since 2017 and in the spring he left a scene that portrayed him: he attacked his manager, Nuno Espírito Santo, on the grass after a draw. What no one denies are the sporting successes: in 2024, Olympiacos became the first Greek team to win a continental title (the Conference, with José Luis Mendilibar), and brought Forest back to the Premier League two decades later and to Europe after 30 years. Of course, he is already on his third coach this season.
“He was a special boy,” describes Moisés Hurtado (44), who signed for Olympiacos in 2010 thanks to Ernesto Valverde, who always had good words for Marinakis. “It was his first year as president. He was a huge person and had two bodyguards almost bigger than him. He commanded a certain respect and he also wanted to give that image. After a derby which we won against Panathinaikos, a bit of a robbery for us, he came down with bloody knuckles, took me in his arms and lifted me into the air shouting: ‘This is the spirit of Olympiacos,’ recalls the former Espanyol player. “The Greeks loved it. they enjoy playing football. a lot and Marinakis was an important point. “People loved him very much.”
Even more so after the historic victory of the Conference. There, in addition to Mendi, was Vicente Iborra (37), now assistant coach of Levante. “I started the pre-season with almost 50 teammates and that year I had four coaches and three sporting directors. It was difficult to think that it would go well, but in Greece it seems more normal,” underlines the former kingpin. Olympiacos’ numbers, however, are difficult to surpass: almost 300 arrivals in the entire period of Marinakis, despite a positive balance for the coffers of around 67 million, according to Transfermarkt.
Olympiacos is the big club in Piraeus, the port of Athens on whose banks the Georgios Karaiskakis stadium and the Palace of Peace and Friendship stand, and the Marinakis family grew up strong there. Evangelos, whom Iborra remembers as “measured” and “distant from the beginning”, inherited his father’s shipping company at the beginning of the century, which today has more than 100 ships. “One player went to his house and said he had a screen with all his ships,” says Moisés Hurtado. Beyond football and the sea, he was an advisor in Piraeus to the same mayor (Ioannis Moralis) who is now vice-president of Olympiacos and who is also on trial, owns two newspapers and a television, has just entered the world of theatre, and was even involved in a controversy on behalf of Ukraine with the former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
In September, at a meeting in Thessaloniki, Marinakis proposed that Ukraine cede the territory to Russia. “What I would prefer is for children to stop dying, for Russia to keep part of Ukraine and for the war to end,” he said. A position that received strong rejection from Johnson. “What percentage of Ukraine would it be right to hand over to the aggressor to stop the war? What percentage of Czechoslovakia would you have given to Hitler?” he asked. “It’s not the same,” replied the Olympiacos president. “It’s exactly the same thing! If we are weak now, we will pay for it later,” concluded the former politician.
Owner of Nottingham’s Olympiacos and majority shareholder of Portuguese Rio Ave, Marinakis is an example of timeshare in football too. And, finally, he is president of the Greek League and second vice president of the Federation. “People talked about him as a businessman with a lot of power in Greece and with a strong character,” says Chema Rodríguez, now at Racing de Ferrol and who spent the first half of 2019-20 at Forest. “We played in the Championship (English Second Division) and we didn’t see much. Now there’s more,” says this 33-year-old central defender. And not always for the better. In 2024, he was banned for five matches for spitting in front of a referee (in his country he was banned for five months in 2021 for insulting a referee), and last season he banned former footballer and Sky Sports commentator Gary Neville from entering the stadium. These are the rules of Evangelos Marinakis, who has the tattoo on his left arm: “Dream Love Create Fight Survive Win”, the same words that appear superimposed at the entrance to the Olympiacos museum.
