12 months have passed away since I started the save at Olympique Lyonnais and I think it's time for a short review of the season. The first months at the Parc de Prince of the season couldn't start be better. After we did all the transfers, like mentioned in the last blog we headed to our first competitive match against PSG in the Trophée des champions. Thanks to 3 goals in the first half we manage to get our first silverware:

The trophy isn't the most important one for sure, but it's really nice to beat PSG in a final and it will give us some confidence for the upcoming league games.

The form continued in the league and we were able to challenge the parisien for the top league spot. Sadly Di Maria could score a late equalizer (90th minute) in the first match between the two teams. This win would have been huge, but nevertheless with Laczacette and Fekir scoring for fun we managed to stay on top until the winter break. PSG played really poor away frome home, which made me think there was a real chance of getting the league title.

The performances in the Champions Cup were even better and hardly to believe. We managed to finish 1st in a group with Manchester City, Sporting Lisbon and Rostov, which resulted with a draw against Arsenal in the next round.

During winterbreak I decided to sell Sergi Darded for 20+ mio to Napoli, as we did just have to many central midfielders.

Troubles

With Lacazette on the first place, by quite some distance , of the goalscoring board as Cavani wasnt scoring that much, some interests from the big guys of the premier league arise. Arsenal and Liverpool start with bids around £30 mio, but this was clearly not enough for me.

The player thought the move to the Premier League was that what he wanted, but not with me. I would have only accepted a bid around £90 mio. In the end I forced him to stay for at least another 1/2 year. Due to this we started the 2nd part of the season with an unhappy key player.

The first few games weren't too bad as we still won the games and Lacazette was still scoring goals, but then suddenly the performances of the whole have dropped a bit and we lost against Arsenal in the Chamions Cup (that made it to the final!), got beaten by PSG in the Coupe de la Ligue final on penalties and didn't win in the league for 5 games.

With that run of bad games PSG could go on top without problems and Monaco was challenging us for 2nd place. Luckily we managed to get somehow back to the winning side & and could even win the French Cup with wins over Ajaccio, Auxerre and Clermont Food. 2 titles in our first season!

After the win of French cup at the end of the season, Lacazette suddenly wanted to get rid of this transfer (as Liverpool didn't want to sign him anymore). I was even able to get him a new 5 year deal without any pay rise!

In the league PSG managed to secure the league title after 36th match day with having 9 points of advance. This gave us the possibility go give some playing time to some of the youth prospects of the club.

Youth Intake

Before the big mess of our main striker affected our results, we were gifted with an amazing intake:

I believe all of the guys have the potential to make it to the first team squad in a few years, but I feel Jan Zambrano can be even more than that. He will possibly the next world-class Lyon strikers after the likes of Lacazette and Benzema

Finances

The first season has been really successfull in terms of finance. The club did make a profit of around 40 millions. The main income was the prize money of Champions cup, that was around 30+ millons.

Promising Youth

Besides the new intakes this season, there are already some high gifted players at the club. These 3 players are pretty close to come in to the squad pretty soon (or are already a part of it, like Mammana).

Emmanuel Mammana

Houssem Aouar

Lucas Tousart