Victory in Angers on Sunday night landed Lille Olympique Sporting Club (Losc) its first French championship since the 2010-2011 season. Its fourth Ligue 1 title was due, in some part at least, to the ambition and innovative business model introduced by the club’s former president, Luxembourg entrepreneur Gerard Lopez. Lopez announced at the end of 2020 that he was selling the club and quit as president following a restructuring of loans with US investment group Elliot.

Thierry Labro: Having left Lille, after proposing to buy back shares from the Elliott fund, rumours are circulating about new projects. Where are you at with those?

Gerard Lopez: There are two funds I’ve been able to work with. One that I’m now looking at in detail. There’s no rush. I continue to think--and I proved it in Lille--that football is a sport that I am passionate about and that needs to be reinvented economically to be sustainable. The paradox is that the criticisms I had to endure at the beginning of my project have become the mantras of almost all clubs today.

At first, I announced quite openly that the only way to exist and perform at a sporting level was through the sale and purchase of players. I was criticised for two reasons: firstly, because it was said that it was a capitalistic view, and secondly because it was said that I was not interested in performance. Aside from the first year, when I didn’t have any experienced players--because the coach didn’t want them--my club still finished fourth, then second, and is currently first. On the performance side, we’ve seen worse in three seasons…

Especially without having “stars” or spending a lot of money…

Nobody had done that in French football! From there, I proved that performance is at the heart of the project. What is also at the heart of the project is to create value for the club. In my case, the valuation of assets today exceeds €300m. Almost €150m of debt was repaid, including the historical debt prior to my project. And there is still €150-160m to be paid back. We went from a club that had very high debts and had no future to a club that has debts but has a much larger asset. And sports and the economy lined up. That covid has done damage, that the TV rights have crashed, that cash flows are tense, that’s the reality in Lille, and that’s the reality in 17 clubs in France if you exclude PSG, Monaco and Nice.

If I can play devil’s advocate a little bit, is your model that’s good, or was it a happy combination of circumstances that doesn’t make the model replicable?

The model is very precise as we announced at the beginning. We executed it and we succeeded. You can be lucky for one season. If you sell a lot of players every year and every year you rebuild a team and you perform at an even higher level, your model works.

What model are you talking about?

You start with a rather large investment in the players. But most importantly, you’re making a very important investment in the club structure. And you make the club create a culture, which is where the coach is very important, like the people who are looking after the players. A culture in which it is very easy for young players to adapt and find themselves in the club. You have a game system that doesn’t change often, you have a club that is at the service of young players from all points of view, on the pitch, in the locker room and off the pitch. A culture of acceptance. And you have experienced players around this.

When you go looking for players, unlike most clubs, because you don’t change your coach, because your system doesn’t change, you remove variables. And I create certainty. When the recruitment team looks for a player, it is not looking for the best player in that position, but the one who will best adapt to the players who will stay. Every season, you start with players who are different, but with a game system that is almost the same, players who are there and who know it, and others who don’t need to learn four or five [new systems] because the coach changes every weekend.

I didn't invent this system, I just made it something much more advanced. The system was invented in large part by Johan Cruyff at Ajax in Amsterdam. Across all age categories Ajax plays the same type of football. Ajax changes its team every year and always performs well. We took a similar model, maybe pushed a little more, adapted it to modern football today.

"Your TV rights are not a variable, they are a constant."

What is modern football today?

It’s a very simple equation: performance costs money. If you have money to spend, because clubs are owned by big investors or billionaires, the equation is simple. You put money in, and, eventually, if you do everything right, you’ll get the performance. If you don’t have astronomical sums to invest, which sometimes go up to hundreds of millions of euros per year, your stadium, even if you fill it every match day, will not bring you more than the number of seats it contains. Your TV rights are not a variable, they are a constant.

Outside of England, you don’t have a single championship in Europe where the fees are high enough to cover the spending of a successful club. If your stadium income, your TV rights income and your sponsorship income--and sponsors are not currently rushing into football--don’t allow you to cover the [expenses required for the desired] performance, you have two choices. Either you become an average club and you accept it, with the risks that this may entail (you can finish anywhere from 10th to 18th, as we see every year), or the only variable on which you can play is that of young players. Kind of like you’re in capital venture. You invest in talent and you decide to build that talent, for which you create an environment in which you remove the risk factors.

This goes back to the last serious conversation we had about football, before you took the reins in Lille, where you were already talking about it in these terms, to screen the training centre to see who was going to emerge and when… You left Lille with more certainty that your model was the right one?

Exactly. The proof is that Lille, having sold nearly €400m euros worth of players over two summers and one winter, is top of the French championship. With an investment of approximately €170m.

One can imagine that you want to go to the top level, right? Dreaming of the Champions League.

The top level will never be the reference for me. I’m not interested in doing a project like this at a club that is already ready. Two clubs were mentioned at the beginning of May have produced good young players, Southampton and Genoa. In a football project, whether it’s in Italy or in England, the idea is to invest heavily in players in the first year, and that’s the start of the project. You combine that with players who come from the academy two or three years down the line, and you arrive with a lot, a lot of work, a little know-how and luck, because, sportingly, sometimes the ball hits the post and doesn’t go in… There’s a way to do something exciting.

A project in which I could continue to build a model that makes a club perform well while valuing it financially would interest me. Basically, I wouldn’t do that in another sport. I do it because I’m a football enthusiast. Because for 95 minutes a week I enjoy the excitement without being an investor, a businessman or a manager... or nothing at all.

So, you have no ambition to win the Champions League?

No.

What’s the ultimate thing you want to win?

I am realistic. I want to succeed in a project. For me, success is to try to achieve the maximum performance that a medium-sized club can achieve. Take the Italian championship which is a high-level league with Inter, Juve, AC Milan, Naples, and now a team like Atalanta, which works rather well. When you want to win the championship, you have to beat all those teams. It would be pretentious to say that you can do it. How pretentious it would have been to say at Lille: ‘You can beat PSG into first place…’

Yes, but that doesn’t stop you from saying that you dream of a trophy like the Champions League...

I dream of going to play it and one day achieving a good result with a club. Winning it means you take on all those Italian clubs, the same thing in England, Spain and Germany. With any club, I’d like to play Europe! If I were to invest in Italy, I would like to invest in players with whom I could qualify for the European Cup in the next two years. This level interests me. The fact that Lille can win the championship two matches before the end makes me very proud. Four years ago, no one would have believed it.

Every year, when we sold players, people said that it wasn’t going to work and that we were going to have a bad season. Each time, we have had a good season. That’s the merit of the players, the merit of the coach, who are the actors of a script that you write. At some point, I would like to do the same thing again. Especially because I have also been able to make mistakes and you learn from your mistakes. There are certainly things I will correct. Economics is a matter of power, because you can’t run a club if you’re not interested in it. But if I could avoid thinking about it and just focus on the games, I’d love to.

Haven’t we arrived at a weird time regarding TV rights? There was a time when you went to the stadium, another time when the games were broadcast on a channel, and now things have exploded with official sites, streaming sites and pirate broadcasts…

This is a problem, of course. We forgot the experience of the person, who is the most interesting in the chain, the supporter, the fan, those who are genuinely interested in football. There are places where it takes three subscriptions to see all the games. It’s just not possible. In England, it is clear, and they are the ones who receive the most money. Italy is now in a one-offer model, with Germany in the same position. In France, we have this mishmash, but it may change and return to something more focused.

"Sport now offers media content that is extremely interesting"

Are clubs too dependent on TV rights?

Completely! And you can’t go back. It’s like saying that the NBA is too dependent on American TV rights. Going back to the fries and sausage clubs, with a few people helping you for free, would make me happy. You see nice games at the weekends. But it’s not high-performance football and modern football. It’s too easy to criticise television rights in football when you don’t criticise them in other sports. Nobody criticises that the winner of Roland-Garros wins what they win. Or that the winner of the Masters in golf gets what he gets. The money comes from TV rights, whether it’s in the NBA, the NFL, American football, baseball…

Today, in baseball you have contracts worth $250m per player. Per player. Sport is super interesting consumer content. In France alone, you have 20 Ligue 1 teams, each team plays 38 games… not to mention the French cup, the league cup, the European cup… You pay €700m to €1bn for this. If you take the production cost of a series for Netflix, it’s beyond that, and you have about a hundredth of the content! Sport has this advantage!

Yes, you pay the actors, but you don’t have to write a script, they develop themselves. In addition, sport affects all social strata and all ages. When you see that a Netflix series costs €400 to €500m for a season, and that it’s 30 episodes...And it’s emotional: you don’t know the result, and you can identify with stars, whether they’re called Neymar or Mbappé.

Outside of its sporting context, sport now offers media content that is extremely interesting. Why have TV rights exploded in the United States over the past 10 years in almost all sports? It’s simple: you can’t fill a schedule of programmes with the weather, the television news.... They don’t provide emotions. You can have the best show on Netflix in the world, you’ll love it, a little stressed out about whether the main character is going to die or not… It’s written in advance.

If you have a friend who watched it before, that can spoil it and you and you will know what will happen. In sports, it does not happen. In basketball, you have an NBA final with a score of 101-101 two seconds from the end… Can you imagine a television series that could provide the same sensation? It’s impossible! Sport has that huge advantage, and it will always have that advantage. Football is even more special. It’s emotions, but it’s also team membership, often in a city or a region…

…which has changed a bit in recent years with the mercenarisation of players, right? Transfers worth €200m for players who don’t have any local attachment…

It’s up to me to play devil’s advocate! Do you think that PSG fans are complaining that Neymar is playing for their club?

No!

You think other club fans hate PSG for it?

Yes.

And that’s where you have a great story! You have the story of fans who hate other clubs. How is that any different from football 50 years ago? When we think about football 50 years ago, we never talk about how Real Madrid, when they won all the European cups, they brought players like Puskás, like [Raymond] Kopa, or they naturalized Di Stefano, who had never set foot in Madrid. It didn’t bother anyone, except Barcelona or Stade de Reims, because they were taking their best players.... It’s no different today. As in all sports, it’s overpublicised! We live in the moment! But nothing has changed! Rivalries exist, they have just become globalised because you now have Real fans in South Korea, China, Japan, Malaysia. Real Madrid had no fans in Malaysia 60 years ago. The numbers exploded.

The numbers exploded, as did the ratings and fan clubs. Can sport in general and football in particular, as in the rest of finance, become so decentralised? Could this change the financialisation of transfers, as if a community could buy a player to put him at the service of his club?

It’s been brought up many times. All of these things--although they change their name--exist. If you consider a football player more than a human being who knows how to play football, who is young, who has a private life, to consider him financially, he has an emotional value. The fact that the club can love the player. The fact that the fans can love the player. And a financial value, since you have costs, salaries, transfer and sales costs of the player. In other industries, very often they do secure assets. You borrow against a building. Part of what we do in football.

One of the things we’re seeing now with cryptocurrencies is the ability to give anyone on the street a little bit of something. I’ve seen a lot of projects, and I think that either at the club entity level or at the player level, it’s going to happen. The “club” entity is that clubs that are partly owned by investors, or have problems and that seek to make themselves a partnership model, have a great deal of difficulty because of the statutes, leagues, etc. One way to create a partnership model without going through changes of status is to digitise part of the club’s assets. It is inevitable, and we will see it at some point.

It’s also great in terms of the fans' commitment to the club…

Of course! Why are listed clubs overvalued for purchase? Take Rome, which was bought out not long ago, and whose new owner paid far more than the stock market value. This value is not representative of the club’s value, and certainly is also not representative of the club’s emotional value! Whoever has a share in Rome is proud to be a shareholder, and he doesn’t care about the performance of the share! He didn’t buy Facebook or Tesla! He’s the best shareholder in the world. He doesn’t care about the bottom line as long as the club is performing well. This emotionality must not be lost!

We can also imagine that partners who want to see Messi in Lille could start a fund…

Of course! There is no limit! Even for a new stadium! We are at the dawn of this financial decentralisation that could provide new elements. At the base of everything, at the base of my football, there is emotion! It’s much easier to trade corporate stocks than to do what we do in football. But stocks in companies, it’s not something that makes my stomach ache like when I lost in the championship! We must not lose this emotion!

A few years ago, we saw some people with fortunes--Arabian, Chinese or American--looking to buy clubs as a new personal showcase. Do people still want to buy a club like a dancer?

What has changed is the goal. The goal of the dancer has changed. Today, American buyers exist, and more than before, like Middle Eastern buyers. Chinese buyers, a little less, because the government has backed down. Most of those looking to buy football clubs understand that sport in general has become very important in the panorama of content. Content that is irreplaceable.

This article was originally written in French for Paperjam and has been translated and edited for Delano.