Olympique de Marseille, Stade Rennes, Toulouse Football Club and Losc. Four French clubs were involved in the draws for the two smallest cups in Europe, this Friday, September 1. The top three will play the Europa League this season, while the Northerners will focus on the Europa League Conference.

How we meet again… OM will meet a former opponent who has always hurt them, Ajax, an old friend, AEK Athens, the ultras of the two camps being very close for a long time, and the stunning Brighton from Italian manager Roberto De Zerbi. If the club from the seaside town in the south of England is playing its very first European Cup, its enticing attacking game surprised and seduced last season.

“It’s a very tough group,” said Marseille President Pablo Longoria. “The level of competitiveness will be very high. There is a team with a great European tradition which is Ajax, Brighton, which are the revelations of the Premier League, and AEK, which are champions of Greece. There’s going to be a lot of intensity.”

OM have already met the giants of Amsterdam three times in their history, for two defeats and one victory. The fourth clash between former European champions is also spiced up by the elbow-to-elbow between France and the Netherlands in the UEFA index. For the moment, Ligue 1 is slightly behind the Eredivisie in the race for the precious fifth place, the one that gives the right to a fourth team in C1.

AEK is also an old acquaintance of OM due to the friendship that binds two important groups of supporters, Commando Ultra 84 in Marseille and Original 21 in Athens.

Stade Rennes is doing barely better. During the group stage, the Bretons will face the Spaniards of Villarreal, winner of the trophy in 2021, the Israeli club Maccabi Haifa, who played in the Champions League last season, and the Greeks of Panathinaikos, OM scorers this summer, then eliminated in the C1 play-off.

“It’s a fairly open, homogeneous draw,” said Olivier Cloarec, president of Stade Rennes. We will wait for the calendar to see how the trips are going, how they fit into the championship calendar. By going to Israel and Greece, the atmosphere is guaranteed. The first objective is to get out of the chickens. The black point of last season was the elimination against Donetsk, which stuck in our throats. When we enter the competition, it is to finish in the highest possible place, we are not going to curb our ambitions, nor are we going to say: “We absolutely want to be first”. The primary objective is to get out of the pool. »

The fate was a little less harsh with the third French club involved. If Toulouse is in the group of Liverpool, the other adversaries, the Austrians of Linz ASK and the Union saint-gilloise, a club of Brussels, are more accessible. The Violets thus find the European Cup, 14 years after their last participation, thanks to their victory in the Coupe de France last season.

But for Damien Comolli, president of Toulouse, there will be no inferiority complex. “I can’t speak for the other clubs, but what’s important is that every Thursday it’s going to be the best team playing, and we’re going to keep our playing identity. Is that going to be enough? I don’t know, but when I spoke to the players about the objectives for the season, I was very clear with them and told them that the objective was to go as far as possible in the Europa League. In words, gestures, intentions we will be there, there is no reason for us to be complex. »

Lille inherited a group within their reach for the group stage of the Europa League Conference with Slovan Bratislava, Olimpija Ljubljana and the “Tom Thumb” of the Faroe Islands, KI Klaksvik. Trips to Central Europe and to the very north of the continent for the “Dogues”: the Northerners, who qualified with difficulty the day before against the Croats of Rijeka (2-1/1-1 a.p.) and seeded, will be favorites of their group.

Slovak and Slovenian clubs were eliminated in the third preliminary round of the Champions League, Slovan by Maccabi Haifa (1-2/1-3) and Olimpija by Galatasaray (0-3/0-1), and donated to C4 after also losing their Europa League play-off. Champions of Slovakia for the past five seasons, the sky blues of Bratislava were corrected by the Cypriots of Apollon Limassol in the Europa League play-off (2-1/2-6).

Finally, Paulo Fonseca’s men will discover the very first club from the Faroe Islands to reach a group stage of European competition, after having passed the first two preliminary rounds of the Champions League against the Hungarians of Ferencvaros then the Swedes of Häcken.