Michele Kang: “Our challenge for Olympique Lyonnais can speed up the event of ladies’s soccer in France”

OL Groupe, proprietor of Olympique Lyonnais, and Michele Kang, who owns the Spirit of Washington, an expert ladies’s soccer membership, introduced in a press launch on Tuesday Might 16 at 7 p.m. “signed an settlement to create a worldwide multi-team ladies’s soccer construction”. The American businesswoman, 63, would be the majority shareholder and president of this new entity. Actually, she is due to this fact the brand new boss of the ladies’s part of OL. Founder and CEO of Cognosante, a know-how firm specializing in advising governments on well being points, she explains to the World its technique. “The brand new group goals to amass extra golf equipment in different international locations in Europe, America and Asia”, specifies the press launch despatched by OL. Michele Kang may even be part of the board of administrators of OL Groupe.

You’re neighbor, in Florida, of John Textor, the brand new proprietor of OL, however there’s, in fact, greater than a geographical proximity on the origin of your arrival in Lyon…

Since proudly owning the Washington Spirit, my ambition has been to create a worldwide multi-club platform in ladies’s soccer. We have been searching for the absolute best accomplice. I didn’t know something about Eagle Soccer or John Textor. When the deal to purchase OL by Eagle Soccer was concluded in December 2022, I noticed it as a possibility to make my challenge a actuality. I requested funding financial institution Raine Group to introduce me to John Textor. We occurred to be neighbors. We met for the primary time in January and, with ardour, I informed him how nice it will be to have him as a accomplice in constructing this unprecedented group in ladies’s soccer.

You at the moment are 52% proprietor of a brand new construction which owns the Spirit franchise and OL ladies. Are you able to clarify to us the shape and operation of it?

It will likely be an “umbrella construction”, of which the Spirit and OL shall be half, with, I hope, different groups later. There shall be a really small and centralized board and administration at group degree, which I’ll chair, however every entity will function by itself. No names and colours shall be modified, we respect every metropolis’s historical past and native followers. These two groups deserve all the precise funding and a spotlight that on their scale just one can’t receive.

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