European girls’s powerhouse Olympique Lyonnais Féminin (Lyon) will rebrand as OL Lyonnes, majority proprietor Michele Kang introduced on Monday.
The Lyonnes identify is a play on the time period “lioness” and town’s identify, Lyon.
Kang mentioned the workforce took the freedom of changing the “i” with a “y” within the French spelling of the phrase to take care of some connection to the lads’s membership and town.
“I hope all French [speakers] forgive us for altering the French phrase, however we determined that it is acceptable to ensure that everybody globally and on this nation know that we’re a part of Lyon,” Kang mentioned on stage on the unveiling.
OL Lyonnes’ new emblem is a roaring crimson lioness with blue and gold accents.
“New Story, Identical Legend,” is the workforce’s new motto.
“This isn’t nearly identify change or emblem change,” Kang mentioned Monday.
Kang additionally introduced that the ladies’s skilled workforce would swap coaching amenities with the membership’s boys’ academy.
The ladies’s workforce will renovate its new house to create a efficiency middle that’s “100% deliberately designed for feminine athletes,” Kang mentioned.
Kang, who Forbes estimates to have a $1.2 billion web price, will finance the work.
Going ahead, the OL Lyonnes will play all video games at Groupama Stadium, which seats about 59,000 individuals and hosted the 2019 Girls’s World Cup last.
The ladies’s workforce beforehand solely performed there sometimes.
“That was one of the vital stunning issues once I first got here,” Kang instructed the Related Press. “The most effective workforce on the planet, I used to be shocked they [Lyon] have been taking part in the vast majority of video games at a coaching middle. It’s unfitting. We wish our followers to be a part of our journey, a part of our group and you may’t obtain fan engagement by continuously switching backwards and forwards.”
Kang additionally owns the London Metropolis Lionesses, which was simply promoted to England’s prime flight forward of subsequent season, and the NWSL’s Washington Spirit.
The Spirit have been in the midst of a years-long model transition; the membership has not offered any definitive timeline on a rebrand.
Kang instructed ESPN not too long ago that she would quickly shut on the acquisition of a fourth workforce, on a brand new continent, as a part of her rising multi-club enterprise known as Kynisca.
Final month, Kang introduced that she is donating the analysis arm of Kynisca, which goals to advance female-specific coaching philosophies, to U.S. Soccer.
She had already invested $25 million into Kynisca’s analysis arm.
She had beforehand already dedicated $30 million over 5 years to U.S. Soccer to fund developments in girls’s nationwide workforce programming and coaching.
OL Lyonnes, because the workforce can be recognized beginning subsequent season, is probably the most profitable girls’s workforce in European historical past.
First introduced underneath the Olympique Lyonnais branding in 2004, the membership has received eight UEFA Girls’s Champions League titles, greater than every other membership.
This season, OL Lyonnes received its 18th French league title previously 19 years.
Kang bought majority management of OL’s girls’s workforce in 2023, creating some independence from the lads’s workforce, whose majority proprietor is fellow American businessman John Textor by means of his Eagle Soccer Group.
Kang has strongly advocated for ladies’s groups to implement unbiased plans that match their very own wants.
“The worst factor we will do to girls’s soccer is to repeat and paste” what the lads’s recreation has been doing for many years, Kang instructed ESPN.
“Our product, in our opinion, is essentially completely different — and I feel males’s workforce house owners will say the identical factor.”
Making a devoted coaching house for the ladies’s workforce was one in every of Kang’s first targets after buying the workforce.
The renovated facility is predicted to be prepared by July 2026, and it’ll characteristic native tie-ins like limestone sourced from Lyon.
Girls’s gamers have particular wants like childcare and being pregnant help, Kang identified.
“Whenever you inform feminine gamers ‘We will do x, y, and z’ feminine gamers all the time wish to know why. There are much more conversations,” Kang mentioned.
“So, from an architectural perspective they want much more house, whether or not it is a person house or public house, conducive to conversations.”
The power may even characteristic a girls’s soccer museum, Kang mentioned.
