A little over two years ago, Monaco were the darlings of Europe, a poster club for excellent recruitment, alluring counter-attacking football and savvy use of the transfer market.
Their peak came in 2016-17 when they earned effusive praise for reaching the Champions League semi-finals. Their rapid decline since then has been astonishing, a heavy fall from glory to ignominy.
Having used the benefits of billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev’s wealth to gain promotion back to the top flight in 2012-13, Monaco finished in the top five for five seasons in a row.
In the year they reached the last four of Europe’s major club competition, they also comfortably held off Paris St-Germain to win the Ligue 1 title – the only season in the past seven that PSG have failed to finish a campaign as French champions.
But the good times did not last. There were signs of decline in 2017-18, but last season Monaco won on the opening day and then managed two more league victories until February. Their first home league win came on 2 February and they survived relegation by one place and two points.
Their Champions League nadir was a 4-0 home defeat by Club Bruges; they finished with a solitary point in the group stage.
Between 2013-14 and 2017-18, Monaco won 60% of their league matches. In the final two seasons of that period, they won 71%. Since then, their win percentage is 22%. Title challengers have become relegation candidates, European ambitions extinguished.
To the uninitiated, there is an obvious explanation for Monaco’s fall from grace. Kylian Mbappe, Fabinho, Benjamin Mendy, Bernardo Silva, Thomas Lemar and Tiemoue Bakayoko all faced Juventus in the Champions League semi-final second leg in 2017, and were sold over the next two
years for fees of £340m.
Surely no club can afford to sell so many of its highest performers and retain realistic hopes of maintaining their performance?
But then this was always Monaco’s plan.
When they reached the Champions League quarter-finals in 2015, knocking out Arsenal in the process, their team contained Anthony Martial, Yannick Carrasco, Layvin Kurzawa and Geoffrey Kondogbia as they coped with the loss of James Rodriguez and Radamel Falcao. Those four players
were all sold that summer to high-profile suitors.
This is how clubs outside of Europe’s financial elite are supposed – even forced – to work. We have seen a similar model replicated by Southampton and then Leicester City in the Premier League: Buy low, develop, sell high, reinvest.
It is not Monaco’s strategy that caused their downfall but the execution of it. They have spent £360m on players over the past three seasons, 14 of whom cost between £10m and £40m. That might not be enough to keep up with Europe’s elite in the Champions League but it should have been
more than sufficient to keep Monaco in the upper echelons of Ligue 1.
The majority of that money was wasted. Monaco’s initial aim was to recruit players who were on the verge of blossoming and fulfilling their potential, peppering the squad with experienced pros such as Joao Moutinho, Falcao and Ricardo Carvalho to mentor those coming through.
But their latest spending drive has focused on younger players who will need at least two or three years to develop into first-team regulars. Pietro Pellegri (16) and Willem Geubbels (16) were just two of a number of teenagers signed. They cost a combined £40m, and have so far played a total
of 107 Ligue 1 minutes.
That might have worked out if the established players had pulled their weight.
But recent signings Aleksandr Golovin – sent off in a 3-1 defeat at Montpellier on Saturday – Nacer Chadli, Jean-Eudes Aholou and Cesc Fabregas have struggled and senior players such as Kamil Glik, Adrien Silva and Gelson Martins have come in for some criticism too.
The inevitable result of scattergun spending is a bloated squad. Monaco used 42 players in league games last season, nine more than any other Ligue 1 club.
