A year and a half after leaving OL, Jean-Michel Aulas is now close to Éveil de Lyon, an amateur club in which his new partner's children play. And the 75-year-old leader, number two on Philippe Diallo's list for the presidency of the FFF, invests every week in the sports structure based in Villeurbanne.
He is never far from a green rectangle. A year and a half after leaving the presidency of OL, to hand over the baton to the American John Textor, Jean-Michel Aulas continues to be involved in Football in his region. At amateur level now. The 75-year-old leader confided it to Ouest-France, during his visit to Rennes last Friday as number two on Philippe Diallo's list for the presidency of the French Football Federation (votes will take place on 10 and December 11).
The former Les Gones boss recently rebuilt his life with “a younger woman”, who has two boys, aged 10 and 14, and a 12-year-old daughter. “I consider them my responsibility”, specifies JMA. The three children play football within Éveil de Lyon, a club created in 1911 and based in Villeurbanne, which presents itself as “the largest in the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region in terms of number of licensees”.
“I go there every Saturday morning”
Every weekend, Jean-Michel Aulas comes to encourage them from the sidelines. And he takes the opportunity to get personally involved in the sports structure. “I serve as an instigator, a guide and I participate in the life of the club,” confides the former vice-president of the FFF. “I spend there every Saturday morning, whether with the volunteers at the refreshment bar, the educators or the president. I'm crazy about amateur football. It allows me to rediscover this football, a little in the spirit of OL when I arrived in 1987, when professional football was much less developed.”
After having been the president of Olympique Lyonnais for thirty-six years, seven-time winner of Ligue 1 and semi-finalist of the Champions League, Aulas is not a father-in-law like the others. People recognize him and ask for him when he arrives in Villeurbanne. Affable and curious, the business leader took the opportunity to quickly build a solid local network: “I am in direct contact with the educators, the president, the volunteers… L'Éveil de Lyon still has 1,200 members. And it allows me to know amateur football from an operational perspective, which was not the case.”
