Despite a title of champion of France in 2019, it is not for its sporting results that the sports club LDLC Asvel Féminin has walked into the columns of The Goodonomist. Since the start of the year, the Lyon women’s basketball club has officially adopted the status of mission-driven company. A first in top-level sport. This development is the result of careful consideration by the club’s president, NBA champion and successful entrepreneur Tony Parker, and the club’s vice-president, Marie-Sophie Obama, also a former professional basketball player. Interview with a woman determined to move the lines of high-level sport.
Where does this initiative come from?
When Tony Parker took over the management of the club in 2017, he was economically and sportingly in bad shape. An economic bailout was needed. So when I arrived during the season, we became interested in the club’s entrepreneurial project, in order to find solutions to allow us to have the resources to continue.
But for that, we could not duplicate our project on that of the men’s team. Because its economic model is simply not that of the women’s team. With a 5,500-seat hall, the men’s team can generate revenue linked to events, for example. The women’s team does not have the same visibility. So we said to ourselves: we have to create a path specific to women’s sport.
How do you come to the conclusion that you have to create a company with a mission?
We were in full swing #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc. We said to ourselves that we had to take over on this question of the place of women in society. We therefore created an association, Les Lumineuses, to celebrate the performance of women in sport, but also in gastronomy or the associative world. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 has brought a big halt to all levels of our various activities, including this association. However, the pandemic has also pushed us to follow through on our commitment to society. Especially since with the crisis, the economic threat has become more pressing on commitments made, contracts signed. There were major uncertainties and we had to reflect and commit 100% to find a viable economic model.
Thanks to my commitments with the International Women Forum, I met Isabelle Grosmaitre, the founder of Goodness & Co. She was the first witness to this club model as a company with a mission.
Can we say that your commitment was born of the lack of resources granted to women’s sport in France?
In women’s basketball, we have very virtuous economic models like in Bourges. But in general, these are clubs which are the only centers of attraction in their territory, or which have less competition as can be found in large cities, such as Lyon.
When you want to compete with the best European clubs, it is difficult to find an economic model. If you don’t have support, sponsors like Tony Parker… It’s hard to become attractive or bankable. There is a lack of visibility in women’s sport. But it is also this handicap that has forced us to find new ways of working.
When we started working on our mission-driven business project, I always said to myself: if we exist, we have our way, the goal is to find the right paths. We can’t copy the model of the men’s teams because we don’t have the same resources. But it is this handicap that pushes us to audacity, to creativity and that allows us to invent new models and think about how sport can take a new place in society.
Concretely, what does it change for the club to be a company with a mission?
Being a company with a mission commits us, it is a Purpose and objectives inscribed in our DNA, in our statutes. We have the ambition to put our passion at the service of society. Concretely, for us, these new statutes have enabled us to aggregate new professions which revolve around 4 themes:
- “Body and Mind positivity”: it is about allowing women to get to know themselves and break their limiting beliefs.
- “Growing up through sport”: we want to break gender stereotypes in society with young girls and boys and work with young girls and women so that they can believe in their dreams.
- “Female entrepreneurship”: the goal is to encourage women on this path, to help them dare to embark on a project, in particular through mentoring.
- “The feminization of governing bodies”: the objective is to help women break the glass ceiling that can be observed in large organizations.
According to these four themes, we act in different ways. With regard to mentoring, for example, we have set up professional training. We also have actions with the Region: we thus become their service provider to act within the framework of systems dedicated to women victims of violence. We act on the reconstruction or self-confidence. We support our partners for sourcing or recruitment in order to feminize their teams, especially in management positions. Finally, with our network and thanks to the lever that is sport, we allow young girls or women to break taboos, break their own chains and discover worlds they do not know.
What is your ambition for French society?
Sport is not an engine of French society as we can see in the United States. But we took the gamble that sport would precisely become a tool for the good of society, that it would not just be a narcissistic medium on which we come to admire the performance of athletes. Athletes also need to open their doors. That’s what we decided to do.
