A glance at the figures alone suggests Monaco have clicked into downsize mode. Where only recently the club from the principality, backed by Dmitry Rybolovlev’s billions, were going toe to toe in the transfer market with Paris Saint-Germain and the money-flushed might of the Premier League, now they appear to be in retreat. Stade Louis II was briefly home to Radamel Falcao and James Rodríguez and staged a Champions League quarter-final back in April. These days the more common headlines on the Côte d’Azur are of big-money departures from a team mid-table in Ligue 1 and reduced to life in the Europa League.
Tottenham Hotspur visit on Thursday and, on paper, need not be too daunted by what awaits. This is a very different beast to the club whose outlay in the giddy summer of 2013 had amounted to £150m, most notably on Falcao, James, João Moutinho and Geoffrey Kondogbia, not to mention the huge salaries dished out to the veterans Ricardo Carvalho and Éric Abidal.
Back then Rybolovlev’s lavish spending – he had bought his controlling stake in December 2011 when the Monégasques languished bottom of Ligue 2 – was reminiscent of Roman Abramovich a decade earlier and the most obvious route to instant success on the field. The vice-president, Vadim Vasilyev, described it as a “jump start”. Traipsing in second to PSG in that first year back in the top flight was actually a triumph. The project had legs.
Yet the strategy has morphed. For some of those talents – many of whom are part of Jorge Mendes’ stable of clients at Gestifute – Monaco was merely a staging post. After only a year in Ligue 1 James secured his dream move to Real Madrid for more than £60m, still a tidy profit, and Falcao favoured the loan switch to Manchester United, with 25 players shifted at an overall profit of £70m in the summer of 2014.
Vasilyev pointed to Uefa’s Financial Fair Play regulations at a club whose home gates are more suited to the lower two tiers in England. Rival clubs in the French league were bemoaning Monaco’s tax haven status, an unanticipated issue that was resolved only when Rybolovlev – who is still challenging the £2.6bn divorce settlement with his former wife that is so often cited as the motivation for pulling the plug – agreed to pay the governing body around £36m over two years.
Vasilyev stressed Rybolovlev’s commitment remained intact for the long term, but the new motivation was to tap into the club’s academy and develop youth potential. Leonardo Jardim, who was used to such an approach from his time at Sporting Lisbon, accepted the challenge and did wonderfully well to achieve a third-place finish last term and sustain that eye-catching run, including the elimination of Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal en route, to the last eight in the Champions League.
But repeating that trick, and remaining truly competitive, has started to feel unrealistic particularly as, this summer, the swathe of sales was repeated. Falcao, who is contracted at £11m-a-year until 2018, moved to Chelsea on loan. Yannick Ferreira Carrasco joined Atlético Madrid, Kondogbia moved to Internazionale, Layvin Kurzawa to PSG and Aymen Abdennour to Valencia, a team with its own connections to Mendes and whose aggregate win in a two-legged qualifier ensured there would be no elite European football at Monaco this time round. Around £40m was spent on 14 new players, including Stephan el Shaarawy from Milan, but that figure was dwarfed by the £130m raised in sales, an amount bloated by Anthony Martial’s surprise switch to United which was sanctioned on deadline day.
Martial, at 19, was supposed to stay in the principality for one more year at least and spearhead the challenge to secure Champions League football, but few clubs could turn down a deal Vasilyev has claimed could eventually rise to £59m. Martial had cost just £3.7m from Lyon two years ago meaning there was no real decision to make even if, in the short term, Jardim would be left with a team lacking its cutting edge.
“It’s true it’s difficult, if not impossible, for us to refuse such big offers when they come in,” said Vasilyev. “But that shows the value of the work we’re doing. At some point, if we want to go to the next level – say, in Europe – I’d hope players decide to stay longer at Monaco and we have more resources to stay competitive. But, for now, we still have a great team who can go far this season.”
They do retain some older heads. Moutinho and Carvalho are still on the books, as is the France international Jérémy Toulalan. Fábio Coentrão, another Mendes client, has arrived from Real Madrid. Yet their experience is effectively a safety net around assets of promise and potential. Martial’s departure exposed the reality that the billionaire in charge, a Russian still waiting for his Monégasque passport, is no philanthropist.
Instead, his ownership of the club in the shadow of Monte Carlo’s casinos is a glamorous business venture yielding considerable profit. Theirs is a shop window players such as Thomas Lemar, a 19-year-old midfielder secured from Caen, the former Lille youngster Adama Traoré or the excellent Bernardo Silva, 21 and once of Benfica, are using on their way to bigger and better things.
The suggestion is that the principality’s royal family, who retain a sizeable stake in the club, are not entirely comfortable with the image this portrays of their club. But, given where they were when Rybolovlev’s Monaco Sport Investment took control, their complaints count for little. The blip in this club’s recent existence was the heady spending of 2013, not the sales that have littered the last few windows.
It is a risky strategy, and asks a lot of Jardim to ensure the team remains competitive. They have endured a slapdash start to the new season: they were thrashed at home by PSG and loiter ninth, albeit only just behind Lyon, having recovered from a two-goal deficit to win at Montpellier and then share six goals at Guingamp on Sunday. Jardim’s approach to the younger players has been ruthless: Rony Lopes, signed from Manchester City, and the Chelsea loanee Mario Pasalic have been hauled early from games having struggled to impose themselves, with their education brutal at times.
The hope is they learn over time, and the Europa League may prove to be their classroom. The team’s only home victories to date have come in qualifiers for the Champions League, with the 2-1 success over Valencia not enough to progress. They have the feel, quite understandably, of a club adjusting to a disruptive and rather traumatic turnover of players. Spurs have an opportunity they should not pass up.
