Is AS Monaco's trading policy viable in the long term?

• Vice-President Oleg Petrov announced that AS Monaco does not intend to abandon its policy of "trading" young talents.
• After experiencing less success in the last transfer window, the Monaco leaders do not seem to want to change course.
• This high-risk policy is almost a necessity for a club like Monaco. Explanations.

Hunt the natural, it returns to Monaco. Sorry for this shameful Ontenientesque joke, but it stuck so well to the subject that you sometimes have to accept to lower yourself to that level. After an expensive summer on the transfer market (140 million euros slammed, 12th most spending club), far from its usual standards, AS Monaco is preparing to return to its basics, namely to buy at a pace ( too) expensive young promising players to sell them a blind after one or two seasons in the Principality.

This trading policy, erected as a veritable doctrine since the takeover of the club by the Russian billionaire Dmitri Rybolovlev and shelved for a summer to compensate for a somewhat rough recruitment, will make its comeback, according to Oleg Petrov, the Monegasque vice-president. "The trading project remains, it is the pillar of this project and of financial success," he announced last November on the set of the Breaking Foot show on RMC. We have to stay in the Champions League for TV rights, to attract spectators. And we have to keep selling players. The question is whether the leaders are right with this “Football Manager” strategy.

🗣 "Trading is one of the pillars of our financial success ... We will continue to do so!"

Oleg Petrov assures him, AS Monaco will not change its financial model, but will adapt it to be every year in the Champions League #BreakingFoot #RMCLive pic.twitter.com/0oHWXxupji

Monaco saw itself too beautiful

For agent Bruno Satin, this does not even arise. "The trading policy for Monaco is not a choice, it is an obligation," he said at the outset. Since there is no ticketing recipe and very little marketing-merchandising revenue, the sources of income are extremely limited compared to certain competitors so they are obliged to compensate. In these cases, the adjustment variable is always transfers. So to match the criteria of financial fair play, they have to sell to balance the budget but by doing that, you necessarily weaken in sport.

The Monegasques experienced it bitterly last season when the club had to fight from August to May to avoid relegation synonymous with industrial disaster for its owners. "They paid for the accumulation of all their bad choices in the past," confirms Mathieu Faure, journalist at Nice-Matin and specialist in ASM. Like taking advantage of the second place obtained in 2017-2018 to definitively liquidate the French champion team a year earlier.

“They clearly took the big head at one point, admits our colleague. They said to themselves “we still manage to make a Fabinho or a Lemar, there is no reason why it should stop”. They therefore assume that they will be able to make this kind of move every time. Except that for a Fabinho, how many Terrence Kongolo or Adama Diakhaby do you have? They were thrilled by the exceptional success of their first three, four mercatos where they had everything. "It is a very high risk policy", judges Bruno Satin.

How is a negotiation with Monaco, the club which brought back 200 million this summer? http://t.co/8txESKZMUb pic.twitter.com/rpkjvJG2fn

Trading, a risky bet every day

There are at least three risks.

• The impact on the team level

Selling well is good, replacing well is better. However, in this little game, football is very far from the promise of a fun fair "every time we win". However, by opting for a more or less long term trading policy, the right to make mistakes is almost prohibited. "There are two things to correlate," notes the players' agent. The quality of young players and sports performance. It is the combination of these two phenomena that has made Monaco sales successful. The year after (2017-2018), they make the Europa League, it's already quite the same level and it is felt in terms of sales: the same player is simply cheaper. This is the beginning of the vicious circle: you bought badly so you did not have the expected return on the ground, so you are less in a strong position to negotiate, so you sell cheaper, so you can less strengthen yourself well, etc.

• Stacking is not winning

Going into what is called the prospect of young talents is like doing industrial fishing: you throw a huge net to catch as much fish as possible, hoping to fall on the rare pearl, on the competition tuna that we will charge a blind at the auction on a Japanese market. Except that when you only pick up the plane (= unsellable fish, nothing to do with the footballer, rest assured), good luck finding your account. “In Monaco they forced the line. They stacked the young players, they have more than 70 professional contracts this season!, Chokes Bruno Satin. And when it does not work for these boys, it is not always easy to relocate since in Monaco foreigners do not pay tax. They have big salaries, they are at Club Med, it is not easy to exfiltrate. "

Monaco is not a good example. Especially at this time. Their strategy is to trade by buying 40 players hoping to have a Mbappé in the lot. Even they would almost assume not to have a purely sports project.

• AS Monaco is no longer alone

Monegasque leaders must regret the time when they were almost alone on the fresh meat market. A bygone era, for sure. “A club like Lille does a lot too, in Germany you have Leipzig, Dortmund, Gladbach. Salzburg in Austria. The market for very young players has exploded and clubs are forced to pay a high price to sign them. Geubbels, they put 20 million on the table when he only had an aspiring contract in Lyon, ”confirms Mathieu Faure.

Is there a pilot on the plane ?

Last problem that ASM has faced in recent years: the quality of its recruitment unit. This is the sine qua non condition for a club which bases its financial strategy on capital gains on resale. Nowadays, good talent sniffers are rare on the Rock. “Basically there have been two very competent guys in recruitment in recent years: Luis Campos and then Antonio Cordon. Unfortunately since then, in terms of sports policy, there is no longer a pilot on the plane, concludes Satin. It started off somewhat haphazardly. Between the recommendations of Pierre, Paul or Jacques, the requests of the coach and the will of the leaders, it is difficult to have a clear line ”.

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Mathieu Faure confirms: “It is a very opaque club, even more since the Russians arrived. Monaco works without a real sports director, suddenly it's Oleg Petrov who manages the transfer window a bit as Vadim Vasiliev could do. Except that Petrov is not from the soccer world so he discovers both Ligue 1 and both the transfer window, it's complicated. Then he is surrounded by people who know a little about football like Igor Korneiev. Despite this, the colleague from Nice-Matin and So Foot did not die too much for the club. "They manage to fall back on their feet most of the time," he judges. Look at Tielemans, bought 20 million and sold 45 when it was a flop. And when you manage to sell Rachid Ghezzal or Guido Carillo 20 million in England, well, it's not bad (laughs) . "

You just have to take a look at the Monegasque workforce to convince yourself that it is not necessary to shed a tear for this club and its owner. Lecomte, Ben Yedder, Keita Baldé and Golovine are all players who can bring in big money at the end of the season as long as ASM finishes on the podium in May. The time will then come to start all over again. In fact, Monaco under the Russian flag is the remake of the film A day without end but in real life.

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