John Textor has 14 days to find €60m for Lyon or face punishment from the DNCG

Eagle Football, the holding company headed up by John Textor, which manages a number of football club investments, including Botafogo, Crystal Palace and Molenbeek, alongside Ligue 1 team Lyon, appears to be running low in cash.

This has emerged following French football’s financial watchdog, the DNCG, demanding that John Textor finds an additional €60m to inject into OL before 30th June, or else face sanctions from the governing body.

Currently, the budget for next season is considered to be unbalanced by the DNCG. For clubs in Ligue 1 and Ligue 2, the practice required is for them to present a balanced budget for the forthcoming season before end of June, or else face sanctions which could be as light as a fine or as heavy as relegation from the division that they currently sit in.

The €60m required of Textor could be funded in one of two ways: either via player sales, or through the injection of additional cash. The latter feels more realistic to L’Équipe, who note that 2 weeks is not a particularly long amount of time to achieve such a quantity of player sales and that Lyon’s new owners do not wish to decimate manager Laurent Blanc’s first team squad this summer.

Eagle Football appears unfazed by the demands made by the DNCG – Textor’s entourage affirms that this €60m gap does not take into account the club’s latest accounts and the decision to sell the Lyon women’s team to American entrepreneur Michele Kang. Textor’s camp also points out that this gap could easily be made up via the sale of Lyon’s United States women’s team based in Seattle, Washington: OL Reign. Textor hopes to earn €50m from the sale of the Lyon women’s team to Kang. Whilst that transaction is said to be in the process of finalisation, this is not sufficient for the DNCG, who require concrete evidence that such a transaction has closed, rather than mere promises of future money.

Eagle Football has sought to deflect blame from themselves in this situation, pointing out that when they bought the club, there was a €100m deficit within it following COVID-19.

According to Eagle, ex-Lyon President Jean-Michel Aulas promised to make €70m in player sales in Q4 last year, but he did not make any sales in January. This justification on the part of Eagle appears to suggest that they misunderstand the cycle within which the DNCG requires a balanced budget.

Textor intends to renegotiate with the DNCG around whether the €60m number can be brought down, per L’Équipe – again, this is not how the DNCG operates. Ligue 2 side Bordeaux discovered this last season when the French football financial watchdog preliminarily relegated the club to the 3rd division for being unable to demonstrate a balanced budget.

Lyon are set for a hearing in front of the DNCG on 28th June – the Americans are confident and claim they have found the solutions to satisfy the French football financial watchdog.

They intend to present a smaller budget for next season than was previously intended to be proposed by departed President Aulas.

L’Équipe note that since Textor took over Lyon, many well-placed sources have questioned the liquidity of Eagle Football and its ability to genuinely grow the number of football clubs that it has taken majority and minority stakes in, with the near 6 month delay in going from an agreement to acquire Lyon and the eventual closing date suggesting that Textor was seeking for funds to actually buy OL after he found an agreement with which to acquire a majority of the shares.

GFFN | James Thorpe