Quite some time has passed since my (huge) blog about Olympique Lyonnais' history. I Was pretty buzy playing the FM17 Beta and preparing myself for a long journey in the french city. Today I want to introduce you to the team. By team I don't mean my first squad, I will be writing about the coaching and scouting staff.

In my view it's always the staff that makes a club great, talented and quality player are nice but they won't develop or performance as they should when they haven't good coaches around them.

A lot of managers like Ancelotti or Guardiola like to work with they preferred coaches and they act more like a team. It's not just about the manager, it's about everyone in the backroom staff, that's why I will present you (almost) everyone that will start the journey at Lyon.

The Manager

Some of you might know that I like to use real life players for my Football Manager careers, so will I do this time. I will continue with Jean-Michel Aulas philosphy to contract former Lyon players and decided to go with former Lyon striker Lisandro López. I know he is still active at Racing club in Argentina, but I simply don't care.

After some success at FC Porto, Lisandro joined Olympique Lyon in 2009 and scored 59 goals in 119 appearences. Hopefully we will be able to crave Lisandro's first silverware with the french side pretty soon, as he did not win any competition while playing for them.

As you can see my main focus will be on attacking an youth developing. Being a former (or actual) striker it's only logical the strength will in the coaching attributes will be in the attacking area. Besides that I need focus a lot on developing the young talents that will come through the youth system.

DoF & HoYD

With former Lyon, Liverpool, Aston Villa, PSG and France manager Gerard Houiller already in place as a DoF, I decided to stick with him for at least for one season. He has some solid attributes with 15 in "Working with Youngsters" and 16 in both Judging Ability and Potential.

I really like when the DoF provides a lot of youngster with some great potentials, so I'll keeping a eye on him and maybe change him after one season (when we some more money).

Stéphane Roche is currently in place as Head of Youth Development and he has some solid stats. 19 on working with youngsters is really important for this role, but I could also have a bit more on player potential. I will stay with him for at least one season.

The only one replacement I could think of would be Thomas Albeck from RB Leibzig with some amazing stats and great personality (Model Professional). Being a German the low rating in adapting makes me think it would not be a wise decision to go with him.

With Albeck & Ragnick I think RBL has some amazing staff when it comes to player development in FM17!

Scouting

To install a good scouting will be THE most important part regarding my plans for the future. My goal is be to have a first team or maybe a whole squad with players formed at the club. So I need the players to join our club as early as possible. In the first years of Lisandro Lopez' manager career I will not make any restrictions on signing players because we need to improve the finances (currently only five millions on the bank) a lot in order be able to sign the young wonderkids.

So the first 5 years will go down with a classic buy-to-sell strategy. Most of the signings will still be under-23 players because it's easier to sell young than old players.

The squad registration limits the amount of Non-EU players to a maximum of 4 players. That does sound pretty hard, especially when you think about all the Regens that could possibly be generated during the later stages of the game. But luckily all players from Africa (except Egypt and Libya), Cotonou-Natios (adds some from the Caribbean) and Oceania (excluding New Zealand) are treated as EU-Players.

The registration rules combined with a minimum residence of 5y to obtain the french citizenship makes us focus on Europe and Africa regarding the scouting areas. (Maybe we'll setup an affiliate in Spain in order to provide regens from South America with a EU passport later in the game).

The Scouting Knowledge in the desired areas isn't too bad thanks too the affiliated clubs in Senegal and Tunisia. Olympique Lyonnais has currently over 20 affiliated clubs, with the most located in France.

With the possibility to sign a total of 18 scouts we managed to get a world knowledge of 32%. That's not too much but it's ok because I am happy with areas I want to focus on.

The next blog will be about the rest of the backroom staff, which concludes the coaching areas of the first team, the reserves and and the youth team. After that I will be ready to start the FM17 Save at full power.