How O'Brien became beacon of hope at Lyon en route to Everton

As Everton sign Jake O'Brien from Lyon, European football expert Andy Brassell analyses the 6ft 6in centre-back and explains why Toffees supporters should be excited about his arrival.

If Everton fans are looking for a new defensive hero, they might have found their man in Jake O’Brien.

The newly-capped Republic of Ireland international ticks plenty of the boxes Premier League supporters want to see from their central defenders, being sturdy and robust – and we’ll get to him playing through broken noses in a while – but the new boy carries his cape with him off the pitch as well as on it.

Despite being far from loud, O’Brien made an enormous impression in only 12 months in eastern France, and rarely more so than when he rescued his beloved dog after an accident on a winter walk.

Players arriving at Lyon are often housed in club properties next to the city’s famous Parc Tete d’Or, to the north of the centre and a defensive clearance away from the Rhone river.

O'Brien and his dog were enjoying a walk and the former had turned his back for just an instant, to find the latter floundering having fallen through the ice on a frozen lake. O’Brien didn’t hesitate, diving in and hauling his canine pal to safety.

Locals were taken aback to see a 6ft 6in Irishman trudging along the city streets, dripping from head to toe, carrying his rescued but sodden hound under his arm. “I walked back to my house soaked and freezing,” he told L’Equipe in an interview back in March. “I passed a lot of people on the way back home who were staring and laughing at me.”

Having grown up in the seaside town of Youghal in County Cork, it should perhaps not be surprising that O”Brien was so calm and adept in the water. It was not, however, his only rescue act of an extraordinary year in Lyon.

Little had been expected of him when the seven-time French champions reportedly paid Crystal Palace just €1million (around £845,000) last summer, even though he had been a pivotal part of Molenbeek’s title-winning season during his loan spell in the Challenger Pro League, Belgium’s second tier.

He was a signing driven by Lyon’s owner John Textor, whose Eagle Football group has the French giants, Molenbeek, Brazilian side Botafogo and a major shareholding in Palace in its portfolio.

O’Brien’s numbers spoke to Textor and his team; his decisiveness in defensive situations without diving in, and his calmness on the ball. But the new arrival was considered a long-term project rather than a short-term gain.

The plan was that he would sample some of Lyon’s pre-season with the first-team squad before being loaned out to gain the top-level experience he didn’t yet have. Possibly back to Molenbeek, possibly elsewhere.

Yet this didn’t factor in the problems one of France’s most storied clubs had coming their way. Textor had issues with French football’s financial control board, the DNCG, which limited his ability to get busy in the transfer market. With the highly-rated French central defender Castello Lukeba sold to RB Leipzig and the experienced former Liverpool and Southampton man Dejan Lovren struggling with injury, Lyon held onto O’Brien and a faster-than-expected first chance was only just around the corner.

O’Brien immediately impressed with his diligence and his application. Brought in by the team’s second coach of the season, the Italian FIFA World Cup-winner Fabio Grosso, for his first match in charge at Reims, he looked comfortable immediately and was a rare bright spot in a chastening 2-0 defeat that left the club’s fans fearing the worst.

This, really, was the remarkable thing about O’Brien. His new team were in freefall and he was surrounded by out-of-form, unhappy players. It was an environment that could have easily flattened a young player’s confidence, but not O’Brien’s. There is steel behind the shy exterior.

Rising to the occasion

That toughness had already been apparent in Belgium. In Molenbeek’s title run-in O’Brien sustained a broken nose in a top-of-the-table encounter with Beveren, after a collision with an opposing forward left him covered in blood. “There was a lot of it,” the team’s assistant coach Jonathan Alves told Sky Sports’ Adam Bate. “This was first against second (in the table) and we were sure he was going to stop, but he just cleaned himself off.”

A sporting all-rounder in his youth, decorated back in County Cork in boxing, hurling and Gaelic football, O’Brien had the ability in his teenage years of being a quick learner, something he has never lost.

Yet there is much more to him than the imposing physicality of him, even if his height is more than useful. He is very different from the sort of player you expect at first glance, blessed with great pace and rarely giving the ball away; he landed over 88 per cent of his attempted passes in Ligue 1 last season, with quality on the ball traditionally an absolute non-negotiable at Lyon.

This allowed him to adapt comfortably between a three-man and four-man defence. Some vital contributions at the other end of the pitch, notably the diving header that gave Lyon their long-delayed first Ligue 1 win of the season at Rennes in November, meant his growth as a cult figure for the club’s fans, with O’Brien a beacon of hope in their dreadful start to the season.

He was just as important when things took a sharp upturn under Grosso’s successor Pierre Sage. Lyon took just seven points from their first 14 matches in 2023/24 and no team in Ligue 1’s history had ever escaped relegation after such a poor start.

O’Brien helped Lyon not only do that - they even qualified for the UEFA Europa League on the final day. His own last contribution for the club was a towering header past goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma in the narrow Coupe de France final loss to Paris Saint-Germain (meaning only Alexandre Lacazette scored more than him for Lyon last season).

Hearing the 23-year-old acknowledge the pull of Sean Dyche’s ability to “develop young centre-halves” on signing for the Toffees was entirely in character.

See: O'Brien's first Everton interview

He is aware that his positional play could do with some work but speaking earlier this year Sage purred about how O’Brien “starts every training session telling himself he’ll be a better player at the end of it than he was at the beginning”. He is an eager pupil with an insatiable appetite to progress.

Little wonder that Lyon have reportedly banked 20 times what they spent on O’Brien last year – and that it could still end up being a bargain for Everton. If he continues his stratospheric pace of improvement into the coming campaign then there will be no prizes for guessing the Gwladys Street End’s new cheri.

Andy Brassell (@andybrassell) is a sports writer and broadcaster who specialises in European football.