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PowerXXX on 14 January 2016
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Faelco said:
PowerXXX said:
Faelco said:
gamingpotato7 said:

France league is ridiculous, with PSG 20 points ahead of the competition, as well Bayern just obliterating everything. Dismissing Portugal just because we don't have extremely wealthy teams is another indication of snubbing from these rich assholes that rule football. Portugal's teams have been at least for the last 5 years getting better results than France, which was indicated by our 5th place in the Uefa ranking. And when I talk about Portugal, I also talk about Russia for example.


France league is ridiculous now (thanks Paris...), but a few years ago Lyon was one of the best european clubs (I would say Top 20 or better, one of the most regular ones in the Champions League with Arsenal IIRC), and was one of the clubs involved in this project (I don't know about now, but I think they'll manage to get in). This idea is nothing new and has been discussed for years, with fluctuating definitions and "borders". Some clubs are better now than what they were then (Leicester ^^, Paris...), others not so much (Chelsea, Lyon...), but I think this is about the potential, finances and regularity of each club. We'll see how it turns out, if it ever works.

Lyon was more like in Top10 some years ago. I think they reached the semi-finals two times and got knocked down from Bayern and Barcelona respectively? Squad had some top players like Juninho, Govou and some others i am forgetting that when they left, the squad lost personality on the field.

 

10 years ago, top 10 easily :) Only one semi-final against Bayern, but the other defeats were against Barcelona, Manchester United, Milan... Even a few years later in 2010, Lyon knocked down the newly formed "galactic" Madrid with Ronaldo, Benzema, Kaka for example. So yes, Lyon was a huge club, but never became really big financially and invested heavily in a new stadium (the first club-owned stadium in France). In the last few years, Lyon had to save quite a lot of money to finance the stadium and sold some important players (Martial of Manchester United is from Lyon...) and has a really young and a bit inexperienced team (mostly young players formed by the club).

 

But the new Lyon stadium opened last week ! :D So from now on the club will have more money again and should be back on its feet (hopefully) pretty quickly.

Wow i didn't know they got their own stadium this month. This is great news for the club. Wikipedia says that the project started in 2008 and costed 415 million! I think that the team can only go up from here. Having a club-owned stadium is the most important thing for a football club because it makes lot of money. See Juventus for example. They got important in Europe again after getting the stadium and winning the league. Meanwhile teams like Inter, Milan, Roma, Lazio share 2 stadiums and don't own a thing. But to ther defence, goverments are not so helpful in this matter, so unless you have a big investor (and good connections.....) you can't do much.