Mariano to Real Madrid has been confirmed by both clubs. The fee is €33m (3m is added bonus for CL qualification) plus 15% of his resale. Lyon will get 65% of that, so like €24m. Cornet to Wolfsburg also looks imminent, the price is expected to be around €17m. Marcelo has extended his contract by another year. Lyon are pursuing Nicolas Pepe and Moussa Dembele, though nothing officially announced just yet.
Not sure Pepe or Dembele add much but depth to be honest, fine players but not what I would consider impact signings.
Dembele is a stud. Actually really like that deal. Good riddance to Diaz. Never wanted to be here and he's a pain in the ass as a teammate.
He has potential for sure, just not sure about the immediate adjustment from Scotland. Especially from Celtic where my understand is his supporting cast is a completely different level than the rest of the competition.
Absolutely true. With that said he had serious links to Chelsea on 3 separate occasions. Once when he was at Fulham too where he was considered one of the top U18 players in England. Plus he has been heavily linked with Dortmund on two occasions once last summer and then again in January. Top sides see the potential. We could do a lot worse than he.
Champions League draw is today, not sure what I think our ideal draw would be other than we want to avoid Inter Milan from Pot 4 and probably would want Lokomotiv Moscow for Pot1.
We are in Group F, which currently has us with Manchester City and Shakhtar Donestk. And 1899 Hoffenheim finishes out the group. One of the strongest 4 teams so it is not a weak group, nor is unrealistic at all to expect to advance.
There is a chance that I'll be able to go the match against Nimes in October depending on my business schedule and when they actually set the match day/time. I've not been to the new stadium, but went to the Gerland in 2008 when there was a huge model of the new stadium design in the team store.
That'll be so fun! Nimes is fun to watch, it'll be an exciting game! I'm planning to go in November for the derby and possibly the Man City game as well. fingers crossed!
Awesome, Lyon is a great city to visit even outside of the matches, so that should be a lot of fun. If they schedule Nimes for Friday or Saturday it should be no problem for, but I'd probably have to be on my way back by Sunday afternoon... so it's a bit of a waiting game.
Looks like I won't make it to the Nimes match after all, the meeting I was going to attend had the venue shifted from France to Germany. Very disappointing, but it will give me a chance to hop over and visit friends/family in CZ.
Champions League starts today. I can think of no more quintessentially Lyon thing than if we beat Manchester City then go on to lose to Shakhtar and Hoffenheim.
That's the problem! It's infuriating. We play to our competition. That's part of the reason I just don't like Genesio. We'll likely beat Marseille this weekend too yet we struggle with Stasbourg and Caen.
For this reason, I'm actually happy it's Marseille this weekend since we almost certainly would lose if we had to follow Man City with a smaller club. I'm still not super confident, but at least we should show up.
It's funny. I was going to say we'll lose to Ajaccio and then I saw we were playing Marseille and thought the exact same thing!
Marseilles are coming off a far less illustrious Europa League opening match-day so we catch them coming off a home defeat with less rest.
Barcelona for the round of 16. I'd like to think that we planted Umtiti there as a mole for just this occasion. In truth, Barcelona are a bit hit and miss this year so far, and while they are clear favorites - it's not impossible.