The new Lyon manager, Joe Montemurro, is searching for the perfect marriage of style and resilience – building the type of team that wins beautifully but has an ability to make something happen if that beauty isn’t forthcoming.
“That’s what instilling a style is all about,” he says from Lyon’s training ground just under two months since he was announced as the replacement for Chelsea‑bound Sonia Bompastor.
“If we just do our base principles within the style well, we will be able to find the way, because in that you’ve got to leave room for the talent and the excellence of the player.
“The style is the base, the style is the platform, but then you’ve got to leave some space for that little bit of magic, that little bit of creativity, and I’m blessed to have a few who can deliver that in the squad, that’s part of the insurance policy.”
At Arsenal, where Montemurro was in charge between 2017 and 2021, the style was there and the team played some sublime football but that resilience piece was missing at times, the team struggling to dig deep and grind out results against major rivals.
The Australian then joined Juventus, where there was resilience, with wins against Wolfsburg and Lyon, but where the standard of play was not as high as at his previous club.
Now he has come into eight‑time European champions Lyon wanting to make one of the best teams in the world – one that has shown it has that resilience component in its DNA – play the most beautiful football.
“I am obviously very hell-bent on the way I want to play, it’s important to me,” he says. “It’s right to make the best women’s team in the world an entertaining team, the team that you’re going to come to see some magnificent football.”
How do you come into a club such as Lyon, who reached the final of the Champions League last season for the 11th time in 15 seasons, which they lost 2-0 against Barcelona, and balance imprinting your style with being respectful of a winning formula?
“It’s a great question, because they are serial winners,” the 54‑year-old manager says. “They’ve won everything. But the challenge is to keep winning, to keep the team at the top, and to lift the style of the way we want to play and make that really part of how we assess success and failure.”
Establishing a clear definition of success is an important part of what Montemurro wants to do in this opening phase of his time in charge, because getting a team to a point where his style is instinctive takes time. “It’s about changing the mentality of what a win is and what a successful result is,” he says.
“We have to be able to walk off from a game having won thinking about the things we worked on and what we’re trying to achieve, in terms of being a top team and the way we want to play, and thinking about whether we have achieved that. There will be things that we won’t do well. There will be things that we’ll do very, very well. There’ll be days where we do OK. That’s normal until the philosophy, the methodology, becomes a common language.
“Once it’s sunk in then it becomes automatic. We got that probably in year three at Arsenal. But, during those three years of growth, there was always an assessment of how we wanted to play, how we wanted to do things and whether we were being successful in that.”
Montemurro was appointed in June, it all happened very quickly and he describes himself as “the last one left standing” at the end of the recruitment process. Lyon are in a transition period, with the Washington Spirit and London City Lionesses owner, Michele Kang, having completed her purchase of the side in February.
“What she’s trying to achieve is really unique and really fantastic for the women’s game,” Montemurro says. “To have an innovation hub that challenges how we facilitate female footballers, physically, mentally, medically and so on, is really, really unique and really, really important.
“That’s one of the things that I was attracted to, that bringing together of a group that works for female footballers, for what a female footballer looks like, and how we can get that level of high performance. It’s been brilliant and we’ve had a lot of contact. We’ve been discussing a lot of approaches going forward and she’s really hands-on, which is fantastic.
“Top leaders and successful leaders know where their limitations are and where they need to put in people of expertise. The most important thing is to find people that you trust, that you can rely on, that you know will keep challenging and being better. She’s successful for putting the right people in place and that’s why she’s been successful outside of football, and that’s why she will be successful within the women’s game.”
He is not talking about himself but, in Montemurro, Kang has a manager who has experience of managing women’s teams in Australia, England, Italy and now France. “I feel so privileged to have had these different opportunities and these different changes of culture to learn about the game,” he says.
“It’s natural that you just become better by accepting different cultures and accepting the way things are done in other places. I’ve been lucky enough to have been at big clubs, where the reason they are so successful is because they have their own unique way of expressing what they do well.
“I just grow every day by listening, seeing, learning, making decisions – probably sometimes not making the right decisions – and meeting different ways of doing things.”
How’s the French? “Slowly, slowly,” says Montemurro, who speaks Italian, with his family having moved to Australia from southern Italy at the end of the second world war. “We’re getting there every day; one word every day, a mistake every day, a laugh from the players for saying something really funny that doesn’t make sense every day, but it’s all part of the learning and we’ll have this discussion in six months and I think I’ll be OK.”
