Aurélien Tchouaméni and Benoît Badiashile have brought in €120m in the last six months – and the players keep coming
By Luke Entwistle for Get French Football News
New Chelsea signing Benoît Badiashile is the latest player to emerge from Monaco’s unrelenting conveyor belt of talent and he won’t be the last. The Monaco academy boasts a star-studded list of alumni: World Cup winners Thierry Henry, Emmanuel Petit, Lilian Thuram, David Trezeguet and Kylian Mbappé all graduated from the club. When Monaco tinkered with their successful formula of youth development, signing Radamel Falcao and James Rodríguez for big money, they won Ligue 1 and reached the Champions League semi-finals, but that strategy eventually proved unsustainable. They have since returned their focus to developing young players and it is working.
The correction was instigated by the club’s president, Dmitry Rybolovlev, who appointed Paul Mitchell as sporting director in 2020. The Englishman has overseen a return to a version of their previous strategy and it is now bearing fruit. “We lost a bit of focus and vision on our strategy,” says Mitchell, a former player who held backroom roles at MK Dons, Southampton, Tottenham and RB Leipzig before joining Monaco. “Fewer players were moving from the academy platform to the first team. We were recruiting externally en masse and spending an awful lot of money. Correcting this was one of the key objectives.”
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