I’ll Have Five Shares of Abidal, Seven of Juninho, and a Dozen of Malouda, Please

January 26th, 2007 | by: Laurie | Comments Off

Come on, ladies, admit it. You’ve wanted to own a piece of these guys for a long time, haven’t you??

Well, now’s your chance. Everybody, call your broker! It looks like we will soon see the day — probably early next month — when Olympique Lyonnais (Lyon) becomes a publicly traded company.

French laws were changed last year to allow football clubs to be listed on the stock market, and l’OL is the first team to take the plunge. According to ESPN Soccernet, “Under the new French law, soccer clubs are allowed to list if they can show a strong balance sheet and business plan and would have to be in a position to afford a modern stadium.” Which is precisely l’OL’s goal — to use the funds to build a stadium with a crowd capacity of 60,000.

And this really has nothing to do with the France National Team, (sorry if I’m stepping on toes, Sam) except that I’ve come to consider Lyon “Bleus Lite,” since Domenech pulls as many as ten team members from Lyon for any given game. Actually, I think I’ve said before that I believe “Olympique Lyonnais” actually translates to, “Pretty much the entire team of Les Bleus, plus a Swede and a couple of Brazilians and a few random other French guys thrown in for good measure.”

(And somewhere out there, a left-brained, engineering-type guy is firing up his online French translator and muttering, “That can’t possibly be right. I believe she’s fabricating.”)

But anyhow. I doubt that I’m the only one who finds a certain amount of humor in the thought of owning a piece of Malouda (pictured), Abidal, Juninho, and company. So come on, guys! Call up that broker!