With their club in turmoil, Le Havre fan groups are calling for the American owners to leave.
Le Havre, founded in 1872 and considered the oldest club in French professional soccer, has plunged into a deep and unprecedented sporting crisis.
Languishing at the bottom of Ligue 1, and with relegation looming, the club started the week without a coach and a president.
Following a heavy 5-1 loss against leader Paris Saint-Germain over the weekend, Le Havre announced head coach Didier Digard had been suspended, and that the board members of owner Blue Crow Sports Group had accepted the resignation of president Jean-Michel Roussier.
Roussier’s resignation will be formally presented and ratified on Thursday, Le Havre said.
He's led the Normandy club since 2022 while Digard was appointed in the summer of 2024.
The exodus does not end there because French media have reported that sports director Demba Ba and goalkeeping coach Nicolas Douchez are also on their way out.
Blue Crow acquired Le Havre in July 2025, adding it to a portfolio of soccer clubs.
“In the space of just a few days, every individual who embodied this club, who helped bring it back to Ligue 1 (in 2023) and keep it there, has disappeared from its organizational structure,” three supporters groups said in a joint statement.
Le Havre has two points from nine matches and the fans blame the multi-club group based in Houston for the worrying situation.
“Blue Crow represents nothing in Le Havre,” they said. “Blue Crow Sports Group has dismantled (Le Havre) and demonstrates more clearly with each passing day its complete lack of understanding of how to run a football club, its history and its identity. The catastrophe that now looms is entirely their responsibility.”
Le Havre’s next game is against Lorient on Sunday.
“With this crucial match against Lorient approaching, the united front established between the players, the manager and the Kop (of supporters) following the match against PSG has been shattered,” the fan groups said.
A former Le Havre player, Digard managed to keep the team in the topflight over the past two seasons. He leaves the club with a record of 17 wins, 20 draws and 40 losses, according to Ligue 1 statistics.
The club has appointed Jaïr Karam, the academy director, as interim coach and said Yacine Alaoui would oversee administrative and sporting activities until a new chairman and CEO are appointed.
See AP’s full soccer coverage here
FILE - Le Havre's head coach Didier Digard looks on during the French League One soccer match between Paris Saint-Germain and Le Havre at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris, April 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States will stop providing $4 billion in aid each year to Israel in 2027 but will sell arms to its closest ally in the Middle East, President Donald Trump said on Tuesday.
The Republican president told Fox News Channel during a phone call on Election Day for the midterms that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had approached him about the idea and that they have been talking about it for a couple of years.
Trump said Israel doesn’t need the aid and it’s a lot of money for the U.S. to spend. But Trump also said that U.S. aid to Israel has become a Democratic talking point for candidates such as Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a vocal critic of Israel.
Even far-right conservatives, who have supported Trump in the past, have taken issue with U.S. support for Israel, with prominent commentators like Tucker Carlson openly questioning the value of the relationship.
“You can consider it barter. You can consider military aid or cash,” Trump said. “Look, we give them $4 billion of things and money, and they don’t need it. And I was approached by Bibi Netanyahu, and we’ve been talking about it for a couple of years because it’s a lot of money.”
There was no immediate comment from Netanyahu’s office. But at least some of his political opponents were cautious.
Yair Golan, a leader in Israel’s opposition bloc, said an end to U.S. military aid would deal a “severe blow to Israel’s security” at a time when the country is fighting wars on multiple fronts. “The burden of funding defense needs at such a critical juncture will fall entirely upon the Israeli public,” Golan, a former deputy military chief, said in a statement.
The United States has sent tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel over the last few years.
In 2016, President Barack Obama, a Democrat, signed an unprecedented security agreement with Israel to give its military $38 billion over 10 years, amounting to $3.8 billion a year. Under the agreement, Israel’s ability to spend part of the funds on Israeli military products was to be phased out and eventually all of the money would be spent on American military industries.
Netanyahu has talked about the need to wean Israel off the aid in the past and has said that the American aid would end at some point.
He told The Economist in January that he wanted to “taper off” U.S. military aid in the next 10 years and that such a change was “in the works.”
But the optics of the aid had also become an issue, according to Trump, who singled out El-Sayed for using it as a talking point.
“The left uses the $4 billion payment — that everybody knows about, it’s no secret — as a signal of unfairness,” Trump said Tuesday on Fox. “And we can’t allow that to happen. I don’t like that, because it’s too easy. It’s almost too easy a target. And Bibi and I have been talking, and we’ve agreed. He was very understanding of it.”
Phasing out direct military and economic aid to Israel has long been a subject of debate in both countries and has gained traction in the last several years.
There are several issues that complicate it, though, not least of which are obligations the U.S. has to Israel under the terms of the Camp David peace accords with Egypt, which require the United States to support Israel and Egypt with security assistance.
In addition, much of the assistance the U.S. provides Israel comes in the form of foreign military financing, or FMF, that gives Israel the money but requires it to spend the money on American-produced weaponry, meaning the funds are plowed back into the U.S. economy.
Unless Israel plans to spend the same amount on purchasing American materiel, U.S. defense contractors may see an impact.
An academic study published last year showed the U.S. under the administrations of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and Trump provided at least $21.7 billion in military assistance to Israel after the start of the Gaza war in 2023. The study was published on the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel that provoked the conflict.
Another study, also published last year by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs, said the U.S. had spent roughly $10 billion more on security aid and operations in the broader Middle East in the previous two years.
While the reports relied on open source material for most of their findings, they offered some of the most comprehensive accountings of U.S. military aid to close ally Israel and estimated costs of direct American military involvement in the Middle East.
President Donald Trump after speaking in front of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Monday, Nov. 2, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
