OL Féminin Updates Name, Logo

The women’s team at French soccer club Olympique Lyonnais, heretofore usually known as OL Féminin, is the most successful women’s side in Europe in terms of number of trophies won, wrapping up yet another Première Ligue title on Friday. They wasted almost no time after that changing their name to OL Lyonnes yesterday — an intentional pun involving the name of the city of Lyon — and revealing their own logo different from the men’s team. See the release video below.

 

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There’s a lot to unpack behind the scenes here. OL Lyonnes have been majority-owned by businesswoman Michele Kang for about two years now, the rest being held by the club’s holding company. Like the recent English Women’s Super League rebrand, this feels like new management wanting to do things their way, and so the necessity of this rebrand is debatable.

It was not lost on social media users that the lion (even before the rebrand) is a common logo for two of Kang’s clubs: OL as well as London City Lionesses, newly promoted to the WSL. The other one, the NWSL’s Washington Spirit, has been undergoing a slow-motion rebrand for years. But OL and LCL both have reasons for lion imagery; it’s already in OL’s crest, while LCL originated by breaking away from London club Millwall, who have a Lions nickname, and Kang didn’t change their name on buying them. I don’t think this necessarily hints at the direction in which the Spirit rebrand is going.

There are also similarities between the OL Lyonnes logo and the one used by the NWSL’s Seattle Reign during OL’s brief flirtation with owning them.

I find the logo’s color scheme the most interesting because it more prominently adds gold as an accent color, although the club is no stranger to that because of the number of trophies they’ve won this century in both women’s and men’s soccer. It also clearly emphasizes red over blue, when normally for OL red and blue are equal accent colors to the primary white. If the women’s team decides to go their own way with their kits, there are some interesting possibilities, e.g. a red and gold combo, a blue second shirt, etc. I see no reason to think they won’t do that because I really can’t see a Michele Kang-owned team just slapping a different crest on the same shirt.

That’s because I would say Kang is one of the most ambitious sports team owners out there, certainly in women’s sports. She very quickly turned the Spirit into a top-of-the-table team and LCL into promotion contenders, then winners. Even this announcement also came with other news. OL Lyonnes will get their own training facility and play all their matches, instead of only cup matches, at the club’s Groupama Stadium. Those are more significant investments than a new logo, even if we care about the logo the most here, especially since that would make them the first women’s team in Europe to play all matches at their club’s primary stadium.

Read more from OL here.