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- FootBiz newsletter #127: Textor's Lyon disaster laid bare, La Liga's big win and latest on Sheffield Wednesday sale
FootBiz newsletter #127: Textor's Lyon disaster laid bare, La Liga's big win and latest on Sheffield Wednesday sale
PLUS: The New York Times reports Saudi Arabia's PIF is running dry?
Ed Malyon & Matt Hughes
December 02, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
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Yet more headaches for Ligue 1 president Vincent Labrune, who must look at the wreckage laying around him this morning and wonder where it all went wrong.
Unfortunately for dear old Vince, a lot of the blame begins at his door but his biggest concern now is trying to fix French football before he can even get on to the real battle of thinking about growing it again.
A few concerning stories emerged from L’Hexagone over the weekend, beginning with Olympique Lyonnais’ accounts, which were every bit as horrifying as you’d have guessed if you were following the unravelling of John Textor’s Eagle Football scheme earlier this year.
Textor had overpaid for Lyon in the first place — paying nearly €900m (of mainly other people’s money) for it — only to have the club’s broadcast revenue ripped out from underneath him by Labrune’s broken promises on a TV deal (which have since snowballed) to put him in a near-impossible situation.
To escape from this fragile scenario would take a deft hand and discipline. Instead the American, infamously dubbed a “cowboy” by rival chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi, spent wildly and ignored all warnings and attempts to rein him in by the French financial authorities (DNCG) until a showdown hearing in the summer when the DNCG relegated Lyon on account of extreme financial mismanagement.
That finally got Textor’s attention, and he was deposed from atop his own multi-club group while adults were brought into the room to clean everything up. He is now trying to find a buyer for Ares’ stake in Eagle after Ares extended his loan.
Textor finally admitted this week that he has a partnership with Evangelos Marinakis, the owner of Nottingham Forest, a development which has been noted at Crystal Palace. Given Forest were handed Palace’s Europa League spot because of Textor’s financial games, his comments (picked up by The Times) include an admission that Marinakis “has really become the partner that we wanted to have with Crystal Palace”
Marinakis: Textor found a “partner” in the Forest owner, despite his Palace stake
When asked by a Botafogo fan why he’d sold players to Marinakis at what appeared to be below-market valuations, Textor said it was “part of making an adjustment because you trade with that particular friend in a lot of situations.”
Hmmm.
Textor is notionally out of the picture at Lyon now but the financial wreckage continues to smoulder. The club’s general secretary Michael Gerlinger is responsible for the clean-up and has said OL will likely not make any major signings for three years as they seek to return to an even keel.
That will be difficult after annual losses increased by €175m to a jaw-dropping €200m (two-hundred million). As Matt Slater put it succinctly: “John Textor’s time in Euro[pean] football has had a few “last nails” but this one should be final.
“Lyon, the most valuable club he owns, lost €200m last season. He sold their best players, their indoor arena, half of their women’s team & a US subsidiary… to make them worse & poorer.”
After a period of belt-tightening, the new administration hopes to have the club financially healthy again by 2028 and the accounts mention an expected dividing up of assets ahead of what we’d anticipate to be a full divorce from Textor’s global operation.
As L’Equipe neatly summed it up: “Six years after John Textor’s acquisition of OL, OL would then be starting not from scratch, but from much less than scratch.”
"Textor Out”: The OL store was vandalised as Textor’s empire fell apart
Among the other multi-club operations having a tough time of it in France are Strasbourg (see below the paywall) and Nice, both with ownership links to the Premier League’s elite.
Nice managed to lose all six matches they played in November, including a 5-1 defeat to rivals Marseille, leading to an unforgivable scene where hundreds of fans gathered at the entrance to the training ground on Sunday night to block the team bus from returning after their latest defeat (at Lorient). Players and the sporting director were assaulted, abused and spat at, according to multiple local reports.
French football’s crowd issues have felt like they are increasing in recent seasons, and it has been noted by potential investors, but players being attacked by their own fans is something that should alarm any and all stakeholders.
France’s place as one of Europe’s top leagues is increasingly coming into question, given the much-covered collapse of its TV deal(s), the partly resultant financial struggles of its clubs and off-field issues like this weekend in Nice but also; the postponement of Lyon-Marseille due to crowd violence, Lyon-PSG being suspended due to discriminatory chanting, Montpellier vs Saint-Etienne being abandoned due to fireworks being thrown on the field, and a host of other examples.
For INEOS, who are still trying to sell Nice six months after slapping an unrealistic €250m asking price on the club, this is about to become a headache that costs them a lot of money. For the league, these scenes continue to chip away at its sense of worth.
Jim Ratcliffe (left) and INEOS wish to sell Nice so they can focus on Man United
Spurned by broadcasters, the league now features several fanbases revolting against ownership, a question over how many will subscribe to the direct-to-consumer offering that needs to work for the health of the league and a concerning descent into a competitive monopoly.
Paris Saint-Germain’s budget and squad strength is so far ahead of even the second-biggest club, let alone those scuffling in the bottom half of Ligue 1, that you wonder how sustainable that is over the longer term.
PSG and Al-Khelaifi’s privileged positions with UEFA and the ECA (now EFC) mean he’s unlikely to ever take the Parisian club off to join a Super League, but the slow transformation of the Champions League and its own increasingly top-heavy distributions suggest he might not need to make any major moves to transport PSG to an entirely different playing field to their domestic rivals.
Perhaps their imminent jump into NBA Europe will give them something more challenging to focus on.
Given his well-known interest in buying in England, and off the back of Matt Slater’s assertion that Textor might be done in European football, FootBiz asked a couple of well-placed sources who might know whether John Textor would actually pass the English owners and directors test (or whatever it’s called under the new regulatory regime) given the disastrous financial mismanagement of Lyon, the sanctions at the hands of the DNCG and legal action being taken against him by former investors and coaches.
Seemingly, because he did nothing at Crystal Palace that ever resulted in any discipline he would be completely free to own an English club in the future.
Which makes you question whether the rules are anything close to being tight enough when the thing you’re trying to prevent is almost exactly what happened at Lyon.
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