Ligue 1 Review | Jitters season begins as Lyon and Nantes wield the axe
Jitters season is here and it is contagious. Within just two days, Pierre Aristouy and Fabio Grosso found themselves out of a job. FC Nantes’ and Olympique Lyonnais’ relative success increases the risk of the jitters spreading further.
Aristouy looked to have righted the ship at Nantes. The inexperienced manager led Les Canaris to safety after replacing Antoine Kombouaré back in May. That feat earned him the chance to remain in the hot seat at the beginning of the season, but after two defeats in the first two games of the Ligue 1 season, his spell in charge looked like being a short one. Yet Aristouy showed resolve. He righted the ship and by the time of his dismissal, he had Nantes sitting in 11th place, albeit on a run of four games without a victory.
However, that was enough for the ruthless president Waldemar Kita to wield the axe. “We have felt for a while that we were taking a bad turn. We thought that the future of the club could be in peril. After last year, we wanted to act rather than react,” Kita told the media following the appointment of Jocelyn Gourvennec as his replacement. Nantes only avoided relegation on the last day of last season and Kita clearly views ruthlessness as a means to avoiding a similar fate this time around.
Kita isn’t the only one to have gotten the jitters. John Textor has them too, and like Kita, it is a story of wanting to avoid the same mistakes. By his own admission, Textor should have sacked Laurent Blanc as Lyon manager back in the summer. “The work wasn’t there in the pre-season. I made a mistake. I should have made a decision in the summer. I should have made a decision after our Belgian team Molenbeek, which was half-constructed, ended up beating us in the pre-season. That
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