The Groupama Stadium sounded the low point on Tuesday evening in the Champions League for the Olympique Lyonnais women’s team. Never had a match been played with such a small audience.
OL have one of the strongest teams in all of Europe, if not the strongest, but obviously that is no longer enough to attract spectators to Groupama Stadium. Tuesday evening, on behalf of the Champions League, the players of Joe Montemurro, the new women’s coach, hosted Galatasaray and they easily won 3 to 0. Even if this first match of the group stage was not a big event, and what’s more it had been scheduled for 6:45 p.m., the leaders of Olympique Lyonnais, but also the players, took a slap when they entered the pitch. Indeed, in a stadium which can hold up to 59,000 spectators, there were barely more than 3,600 people. The television images were terrible, the stadium inevitably sounded hollow, and the stands were more than sparse.
Sad record for OL
As noted Olympic and Lyonnaisthis huge fiasco comes at the worst time for Michele Kang, who bought the OL women’s team from John Textor, since the American owner is working on a new stadium for her players and is aiming for an enclosure with more than 10,000 seats. At a time when women’s football is breaking attendance record after attendance record in Europe, France suddenly seems to fall back years, while the Olympique Lyonnais women’s team belongs to the elite of world football. Jean-Michel Aulas, now boss of the Women’s Professional Football League, has work to do to quickly rectify the trend, because even the French team is impacted by this drop in public interest in the stadiums, at the very moment where among men, Ligue 1 is experiencing increasingly strong attendances.
