ABSTRACT
The professional Olympique Lyonnais (OL) club became an Anonymous Professional Sports League in 2002, with a budget of 115 million euros, the third highest budget in Ligue for the 2014–2015 season. If the OL was founded in 1950, it had to wait until 2002 before winning its first championship of France. The OL Group is structured around the professional club of the OL presided over by Jean-Michel Aulas since 1987. The notion of sportainment, a contraction of sport and entertainment, symbolizes the marriage between the sport, the spectacle, and the money. This trilogy climaxed in the advent of sport-spectacle and of sport business in the perspective of maximizing the experiences of consumers of the sporting event. The first strategic approach defined by the OL Group consists of making the professional team's performance a genuine showcase of the club-brand. Since the middle of the 2000s, OL has been a pioneer of both French and European women's football.
