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Lyon’s huge investment has had a damaging effect on the club and on player development. But sympathy is limited, says James Eastham

For football fans that feel a sense of schadenfreude when big-spending clubs fall short of their targets, Lyon have provided plenty to smile about in the past three seasons. Shortly after the club won their seventh consecutive league title in 2007-08, president Jean-Michel Aulas decided the way to achieve their ultimate goal of adding the Champions League to their list of honours would be to embark on a spending spree bigger and bolder than anything that had taken place before in France.

Three years and tens of millions of wasted euros later, Lyon are counting the cost of what turned out to be a recklessly expensive policy. Aulas has admitted his strategy proved spectacularly unsuccessful, although it would have been difficult for him to argue otherwise considering his previously all-conquering side have failed to win a single trophy since deciding to go for broke. Reaching the Champions League semi-finals for the first time in their history briefly stemmed the criticism, but that momentary high 16 months ago cannot mask the wider failings of an ill-advised plan.

There’s usually a fall guy in these situations and at Lyon it’s Claude Puel. He was the manager Aulas hired in 2008 to maintain Lyon’s domestic dominance while guiding the side towards European glory. He failed on both fronts despite receiving a level of financial support his predecessors never enjoyed. It was anything but a surprise when the club sacked him at the end of last season. Equally predictably, the affair has now turned bitter, with Puel demanding that the final, unfulfilled year of his contract is paid up. “Having backed him against everyone’s advice, I expected him to behave with more dignity. I put everything in place for him to succeed here,” growled Aulas.

The president has a point, in that he gave Puel bags of money, but looking at how the funds were spent it’s easy to see why Lyon came unstuck. Fees such as €18 million (£16m) for Brazil international Michel Bastos, €14.5m on Jean Makoun – sold for less than half that to Aston Villa last January – and the €14m gamble on a midfielder called Ederson appear more absurd the longer you stare at them.

An overall outlay of €163.5m from 2008 to 2010 in transfer fees alone felt misguided at the time – as if by spending money Lyon would automatically graduate to a higher plane of European football – and looks like seriously bad business when set against the smarter activities of their main domestic rivals during the same period. Marseille’s net spend was around €30m less, yet they ended a trophy drought going back 17 years by winning the league and two league cups. Even more alarmingly, four of Lyon’s signings each cost more than the entire Lille squad that claimed the league and cup double in style last May.

This combination of poor results and unsustainable spending levels has persuaded Aulas to change tack – the idea from now on is to operate along more austere lines. Aulas has replaced Puel with one-time Arsenal captain Rémi Garde, who was assistant to former Lyon managers Paul Le Guen and Gérard Houllier. His experience of heading up the club’s youth scheme should prove useful.

With money running out, Lyon will turn back to the highly regarded training academy that has produced France internationals Karim Benzema, Hatem Ben Arfa and Loïc Rémy over the past decade, but was effectively mothballed by the previous regime. One of the major frustrations of Puel’s final 12 months in charge was that Lyon had five members of France’s 2010 European Under-19 Championship-winning squad on their books but the manager ignored them even though first team performances were below par. After being thwarted by what Aulas now calls “the elitist policy of recent seasons”, this exciting generation of youngsters will finally get a chance to impress.

Garde has been handed a one-year deal but frugality seems to be a long-term proposal. Aulas says the club will sell players consistently over the next few seasons to get their finances in order as they prepare for life in the new 60,000-seat stadium they hope to move into before Euro 2016. And while expectations remain high – a top-three finish is the aim – there will inevitably be less pressure on Garde than Puel because of the financial constraints within which he’s working.

One of the enduring joys of football is that money doesn’t guarantee success. There are plenty of neutrals who believe if a more prudent Lyon get their hands on a trophy, it would be a victory not only for the club but also the wider French game.

From WSC 295 September 2011

Although publishers are increasingly wary of handing out multi-million pound advances, footballers’ autobiographies remain as popular as ever. Joyce Woolridge looks at our seemingly insatiable interest in the life stories of Premier League stars

One morning in 1996 I opened a letter on the bus to work. I thought it was a bill, but instead it asked me if I was interested in writing what became Brian McClair’s autobiography, Odd Man Out. “The people at WSC suggested your name,” it concluded chummily, “please give us a call.” Which I did, nipping out to a phone box during a break.

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David Stubbs looks at the tabloids’ unique style of football reporting

In Chris Horrie and Peter Chippindale’s Stick It Up Your Punter!, their study of the Sun during the 1980s editorship of Kelvin MacKenzie, the authors recount a journalists’ strike during which sub-editors had to write up the football match reports. Wizened old cynics that they were, they decided to turn the task into an exercise of which of them could come up with the most meaningless cliche with which to pad out their copy. The winner was “kick and rush glory boys”.

As with tabloid coverage across the board, their headlines, straplines and copy have, over the past quarter of a century, generated a tag cloud of grab-bag buzz-words – “blast”, “probe”, “lions”, “tragedy”, “flops”, “fury”, “blast”, “swoop”, “sensational”, “glory”, “shame”, “thugs”, “heroes”, and so forth. Not a great deal has changed in 
this respect.
Some have fallen by the way with time. Gary Lineker was habitually described as “hot-shot” back in his mid-1980s pomp, a mode of description which eventually died of hackneyed shame. Even “skipper” seems in danger of extinction.

All of these words have one thing in common. Like the word “pesky”, which was only ever uttered by the likes of Little Plum in the Beano, they are at once deadeningly familiar and yet unspoken by actual people in real life, least of all tabloid readers. A particular example of this is “shaker”, used not to allude to a member of The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, but to convey in six letters an injury scare.

These devices also function to contrast with the inconsequential reality of the football world on a day-to-day basis, as well as the warily, dully discreet equivocations favoured by players and managers when talking to journalists. Much as on Football Focus they’re forced to jazz up a teeth-grindingly tedious interview with a Scott Parker by switching in and out of grainy black and white or zooming in on his hands, so these words add a falsely incendiary gloss.

So, in October 1986, we read in the Daily Mirror that Tony Adams was Gunning For Kerry Dixon on the eve of an Arsenal v Chelsea fixture. Here are the fighting words from Adams whose psychologically warfaring mood that headline captures: “All First Division strikers need careful watching and facing Kerry will be another good test for me.”

Look for sensationalist cliche and you would assume the first port of call to be the Sun. It’s certainly had its moments of crass extremism, such as Argies Get Their Revenge, following England’s World Cup exit to the Hand of God goal in 1986, or the pillorying of Messrs Robson and Taylor. However, it’s almost disappointing to find, on closer inspection, that their coverage throughout the 1980s and 90s was restrained by the standards of the rest of the paper.

So, when flicking through its 1980s pages, with those abysmal Franklin cartoons, red-baiting and headlines like Rape: Why Men Are Hidden Victims, there is also relatively considered prose from the likes of Martin Samuel. Nothing masterly, mind, still tabloidese, with every paragraph beginning with the words “And” or “But”. Yet by no means as addled or moronic as you might fear. Even in 1996, though the coverage of England’s semi-final against Germany is depressingly festooned in flags of St George, there is virtually no “Kraut” bashing.

That, infamously, could not be said for the Mirror under Piers Morgan’s editorship. It was prior to England v Germany that he produced the mock-up cover of Stuart Pearce and Gazza in tin helmets and the Achtung! Surrender headline, a stunt which he recently described as prompting a “massive sense of humour failure” on the part of his detractors. It turns out he unapologetically regards the cover as a sense of humour 
success.

This wasn’t a one-off. From the mid-1980s onwards, the Mirror was more startlingly prone to martial imagery than its Wapping counterpart, real Orwellian “war minus the shooting” stuff, tastelessly so a time when hooligan firms were squaring up to each other for real – indeed, you could read all about these “thugs” and their “nights of shame” on the aghast Mirror back pages.

The word “killer” is deployed frequently and airily on its back pages, Leeds manager Billy Bremner is “blitz Billy”, Paul and Clive Allen, up against each other for QPR and Spurs, are a “family at war”. Man Utd are “shell-shocked” to be beaten 1-0 at Wimbledon, while a 15,000-strong fans’ petition to regain the their ground and presence at a club meeting goes under the headline 
VALLEY WAR. The gruesome, bloody details follow – police were called as directors Derek Ufton and Michael Norris “reeled under a barrage of questions”.

Then, of course, there are those trenches, from which the likes of Crystal Palace are forever charging “with bayonets fixed”, in which burly, yeomen English defenders line up side by side, in which the real nitty-gritty business of football is conducted, and to which the foreign influx would probably be averse. In the Daily Express, in 1992, James Lawton worried about how “battle hardened” Eric Cantona, then of Leeds, would prove in the impending Premier League season, in a piece titled Dainty Eric Must Face Up To Trench Warfare.

If foreigners weren’t conspicuous in tabloid-land decades ago, black footballers certainly were. If you hadn’t noticed in the 1980s that John Barnes, for instance, was black, then the tabloids were on hand with constant reminders. He was, in 1988, our “brightest black pearl”, or, according to Emlyn Hughes, the “best black player ever produced in this country”, an important distinction. In 1986, Steve Curry in the Express felt obliged to describe the “happy Calypso manner” in which Barnes told him he would be prepared to play anywhere for England.

However, when Barnes, Ricky Hill and Brian Stein flew unannounced to Jamaica to take part in a fundraising match there was Fury At Missing Black Aces in the Mirror. Much has remained constant in tabloid coverage. Though Wayne Rooney’s rise has prompted a depressing increase in the penchant for dreadful name-based puns, the England team still vacillate between “lionhearts” and “flops”, as opposed to the routinely, chronically middling 
mediocrities that they are. But some things at least have changed for the better.

From WSC 295 September 2011

Dear WSC
I’m assuming the Ruud Gullit who recently defended himself working for a dictator by saying he wasn’t interested in politics (Caucasus calling, WSC 292) to be the same one who dedicated his 1987 European Player of the Year to Nelson Mandela. I realise people’s opinions can change over 20 years, but I’m just curious as to what made him decide he wasn’t bothered about injustice anymore.
John Chapman, Sheffield

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A dramatic season finale lives up to the pre-match hype. Swansea wobble but survive Reading’s comeback as the Welsh fans look forward to top division games and being patronised by Gary Lineker. Huw Richards recalls the events at Wembley

The essential character of this Championship play-off final was determined 13 days earlier when Reading won the second semi-final. With Cardiff’s elimination it became, as a Swans-supporting friend texted, “a football match, not a civil war”.

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