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The French champions Olympique Lyonnais Féminin have been renamed OL Lyonnes, as part of a series of announcements made by their owner, Michele Kang.
The American businesswoman has also revealed the team will make the Groupama Stadium – home of the Lyon men’s team – their regular home stadium. Kang said other mid-sized stadium alternatives, including a local rugby stadium, were explored before they reached the conclusion that the stadium that hosted the 2019 Women’s World Cup final is the best venue for them.
The record eight-time women’s European champions will also be moving to a new training centre, swapping existing sites with the Lyon boys’ academy, and renovating that training base to be a bespoke “performance campus” built and designed specifically for female athletes, which Kang said she will personally finance.
“It’s not going to be cheap,” she said but declined to disclose exactly how much will be spent on the new, state-of-the-art base, which will include a statue of their captain, Wendie Renard.
“This is going to be better than most men’s teams’s training centres,” Kang said at a press conference on Monday. “It’s actually amazing the team achieved the amount of success it has with the amount of resources allocated to them [previously].”
On Friday the team won their 18th French women’s top-flight title, their fourth in a row, defeating Paris Saint-Germain 3-0 in the playoff final, thanks to goals from Renard, Melchie Dumornay and Kadidiatou Diani.
Their new name is linked to the French spelling of the word “lionesses” (lionnes) but with the i swapped to be a letter y in order to reference the city of Lyon, said Kang, who also owns the newly promoted English independent women’s club London City Lionesses and the NWSL club Washington Spirit.
“This new chapter for OL Lyonnes is about more than a new name and logo,” said Kang, who also unveiled a new logo for the rebranded team, which features a lioness on its new crest. “It’s about redefining what’s possible in women’s football. Our vision is to set the global standard for excellence, ambition and investment in the women’s game.
On their stadium search, Kang said: “We concluded that not only our players deserve the best playing environment, our fans deserve that [too]. We did look at other alternatives, because we all agree, from day one, filling out a 57,000-seater stadium is not possible. For big games we absolutely have aspirations to sell out but not all games are going to be like that.”
