Lyon being bad is definitely something historically sad. I watched them dominate this league when I was growing up, during my college years Lyon was the best team and they had some great European games as well not just France, and unfortunately financial ruin caused them to never recover.
I feel like they need to do better though, they have income, and they are spending way too much on player salaries, if they could get younger players for cheaper, then about a 50-60 million salary spending would be possible and they could pay that easily and then get out of debt. Sell some stuff that they own too, whatever they can, it would cover some of the debt, just like how Barcelona sold some stuff to pay the debt and get some players.
It's sad to see Lyon's current condition, they should be one of the strong teams in Ligue 1, but now they are only ranked 15th. They have 1 win, 1 draw & 3 losses from the 5 matches they have played so far. Their condition is inversely proportional to Marseille, now Marseille is performing better than last season, they are lucky to have Mason Greenwood there who is performing well. Their next match is against Toulouse, let's see what they can get there.
When Lyon and Marseille made a breakthrough in the transfer market by spending a lot of money on player shopping, of course we hope that there will be fierce competition in Ligue 1 this season, but so far only Marseille has put pressure on PSG while Lyon actually has to fall to the bottom of the current Ligue 1 standings, last season Lyon was able to end the position in the Europa League zone but looking at their current performance and inconsistency it is clear to repeating their achievements last season will be very difficult.
Against Toulouse may be the beginning of their resurgence but frankly the possibility of a their downturn can also happen, considering the performance of the two teams that are equally bad at the moment in the league, we cannot deny that maybe toulouse match will add to the long list of Lyon failures in this season.