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Lyon’s huge investment has had a damaging effect on the club and on player development. But sympathy is limited, says James Eastham
For football fans that feel a sense of schadenfreude when big-spending clubs fall short of their targets, Lyon have provided plenty to smile about in the past three seasons. Shortly after the club won their seventh consecutive league title in 2007-08, president Jean-Michel Aulas decided the way to achieve their ultimate goal of adding the Champions League to their list of honours would be to embark on a spending spree bigger and bolder than anything that had taken place before in France.
Three years and tens of millions of wasted euros later, Lyon are counting the cost of what turned out to be a recklessly expensive policy. Aulas has admitted his strategy proved spectacularly unsuccessful, although it would have been difficult for him to argue otherwise considering his previously all-conquering side have failed to win a single trophy since deciding to go for broke. Reaching the Champions League semi-finals for the first time in their history briefly stemmed the criticism, but that momentary high 16 months ago cannot mask the wider failings of an ill-advised plan.
There’s usually a fall guy in these situations and at Lyon it’s Claude Puel. He was the manager Aulas hired in 2008 to maintain Lyon’s domestic dominance while guiding the side towards European glory. He failed on both fronts despite receiving a level of financial support his predecessors never enjoyed. It was anything but a surprise when the club sacked him at the end of last season. Equally predictably, the affair has now turned bitter, with Puel demanding that the final, unfulfilled year of his contract is paid up. “Having backed him against everyone’s advice, I expected him to behave with more dignity. I put everything in place for him to succeed here,” growled Aulas.
The president has a point, in that he gave Puel bags of money, but looking at how the funds were spent it’s easy to see why Lyon came unstuck. Fees such as €18 million (£16m) for Brazil international Michel Bastos, €14.5m on Jean Makoun – sold for less than half that to Aston Villa last January – and the €14m gamble on a midfielder called Ederson appear more absurd the longer you stare at them.
An overall outlay of €163.5m from 2008 to 2010 in transfer fees alone felt misguided at the time – as if by spending money Lyon would automatically graduate to a higher plane of European football – and looks like seriously bad business when set against the smarter activities of their main domestic rivals during the same period. Marseille’s net spend was around €30m less, yet they ended a trophy drought going back 17 years by winning the league and two league cups. Even more alarmingly, four of Lyon’s signings each cost more than the entire Lille squad that claimed the league and cup double in style last May.
This combination of poor results and unsustainable spending levels has persuaded Aulas to change tack – the idea from now on is to operate along more austere lines. Aulas has replaced Puel with one-time Arsenal captain Rémi Garde, who was assistant to former Lyon managers Paul Le Guen and Gérard Houllier. His experience of heading up the club’s youth scheme should prove useful.
With money running out, Lyon will turn back to the highly regarded training academy that has produced France internationals Karim Benzema, Hatem Ben Arfa and Loïc Rémy over the past decade, but was effectively mothballed by the previous regime. One of the major frustrations of Puel’s final 12 months in charge was that Lyon had five members of France’s 2010 European Under-19 Championship-winning squad on their books but the manager ignored them even though first team performances were below par. After being thwarted by what Aulas now calls “the elitist policy of recent seasons”, this exciting generation of youngsters will finally get a chance to impress.
Garde has been handed a one-year deal but frugality seems to be a long-term proposal. Aulas says the club will sell players consistently over the next few seasons to get their finances in order as they prepare for life in the new 60,000-seat stadium they hope to move into before Euro 2016. And while expectations remain high – a top-three finish is the aim – there will inevitably be less pressure on Garde than Puel because of the financial constraints within which he’s working.
One of the enduring joys of football is that money doesn’t guarantee success. There are plenty of neutrals who believe if a more prudent Lyon get their hands on a trophy, it would be a victory not only for the club but also the wider French game.
From WSC 295 September 2011
Simon Hart describes the scenes as Blackburn play their first match under the watchful eye of their new owners
There are three Robbie Savages grinning in front of me as I take my seat in the press box high in the Jack Walker Stand. The one-time Blackburn Rovers midfielder is appearing in a book-plugging interview on his former club’s in-house TV channel, playing on monitors suspended from the ceiling of the stand. The sight of Savage, very much a man of his time with blond highlights and perma-tan, is juxtaposed with the more traditional spectacle unfolding on the hill behind the Riverside Stand opposite. This Sunday lunchtime kick-off is still over half an hour away and supporters trail down the brown hillside before crossing a bridge over the River Darwen and filing into the ground. Today is very much about the old and the new.
Simon Tyres rises early on a Sunday morning to review the football-related programming
Sunday morning television is an odd thing. If it’s not soap omnibuses or Tim Lovejoy operating a whisk, trying desperately to make out that this is how he saw his career going all along, it’s ethical debate shows in the old God slot featuring panellists chosen for their lightness towards universal tolerance. Turning on BBC1 to find Terry Christian taking the moral high ground, any moral high ground, makes you wonder if the last two decades of broadcasting progress were in vain.
Twenty years of the Premier League
by Joe Lovejoy
Mainstream, £11.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 304 June 2012
Joe Lovejoy seems to have set out to write an analysis of the circumstances surrounding the Premier League’s formation and of some of its biggest issues since then, notably foreign players, foreign managers, foreign owners, bungs and grasping agents. The decision to do this chiefly through the medium of long, undigested quotations from interviews with some of the main protagonists means that much of it reads more tediously than it should.
Slotted in between the often wearisome accounts of the machinations of Rick Parry et al are chapters that cast a cursory and abbreviated eye over some of the events on the pitch. “The Big Kick-Off” chapter compiles team lists of the original 22 clubs with a brief, phoned-in intro. This is not the only section that appears to be written almost in note form, but it is one of the more engaging, if you can put faces to the names. Ditto the hasty, often obvious assortment that is “My Top Twenty Matches” (seven of which feature Manchester United being thumped or throw- ing away leads). Spurs’ 2008 comeback 4-4 draw with Arsenal ends with the mystifying statement: “The rest is Lilywhite history.”
“Managers Who Have Won the Premier League” never strays from the perfunctory, as Lovejoy divulges that Alex Ferguson has “more silverware than H Samuel”, José Mourinho is a “Portuguese charmer” and “Monsieur Wenger polarises opinion”. Rather than reading “Twenty Headline Makers”, why not try to guess which major incidents make the cut. You will not go far wrong if you stick with Manchester United, though John Terry’s shagging is a surprise number one. Eric Cantona’s kung-fu assault is unaccountably missing.
If the interviews with players and Premier League worthies that make up the other chapters are also intended to leaven the pudding, you would have thought Alan (“The Geordie Legend”) Shearer should be last on the list. Though he does let slip that “We had a smashing team at Blackburn and we won the league”. “Journeyman goalkeeper” Kevin Poole is almost equally unenlightening, as are Niall Quinn, Stan Collymore, Ryan Giggs and Teddy Sheringham.
Sky Andrew, the agent, and Gordon Taylor offer some thought-provoking comments and the concluding chapters, where the main theme returns, have their moments despite appearing curiously rushed. Most interesting are the reflections on the Financial Fair Play rules and whether UEFA will be able and willing to enforce them. Even the author’s final conclusions about whether the Premier League has met its original objectives (“I don’t think so”) are terse.
Perhaps some space could have been freed up by trimming Gérard Houllier’s rambling foreword. The book would have been improved by some coverage of the events that disrupted the “predictability” of the Premier League, which is lamented throughout, such as Norwich and Villa’s title challenges. Although the preface claims the book is “the story of the Premier League’s first 20 years”, this odd mish-mash is anything but.