Aurélien Tchouaméni and Benoît Badiashile have brought in €120m in the last six months – and the players keep comingBy Luke Entwistle for Get French Football NewsNew 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...
Leonardo Jardim always planned for departures and his side’s 6-1 demolition of Marseille shows they will not relinquish their Ligue 1 crown without a fightBy Adam White and Eric Devin for Get French Football NewsIt is 15 January 2017. Monaco are top of Ligue 1. Leonardo Jardim’s side left Marseille’s Stade Vélodrome with a triumphant 4-1 win and three points to move them above Nice. And there they remained until Valère Germain rounded off an injury-time counterattack to seal a win against St Étienne and the Ligue 1 title in May. That victory against Marseille included a double from Bernardo Silva, a delightful lob from Thomas Lemar and an 89th-minute cameo from Kylian Mbappé. Up to this point, Mbappé had...
Lyon top the table after Ligue 1’s first match day after a 4-0 win over Strasbourg – an emphatic validation for their reconfigured attackBy Adam White and Eric Devin for Get French Football NewsIt seemed too familiar for Lyon in the early going, even if the faces were different. Nabil Fékir is flagged offside, Mariano Díaz finds himself in a good position but shoots straight into the hands of the Strasbourg goalkeeper Bingourou Kamara, and Memphis Depay, hugging the touchline, foolishly concedes a throw-in. Fékir and Lyon’s three other attackers, Depay, Díaz and Bertrand Traoré, looked set to dazzle without any end product, their skill on the ball for nought as they struggled to break down a side who looked...
The forward’s likely destination is Real Madrid for a world record £160m fee – in another age it would not happen but history suggests it may work outWhat do you get if you cross Kylian Mbappé with Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Love Island, Jeremy+Corbyn+hot+leaked+pics and What Is Wrong With My Thumbs? It’s hard to say for sure. But thanks to the hive-mind thought-invasion robots of the internet you are at least now reading this article about the brilliant, wonderful Mbappé and the most interminable, clickbait-heavy transfer story of football’s great summer of money.Most things don’t happen. Often football transfer talk is a kind of currency in itself, a semi-detached entity, enough to lubricate the cogs, push related deals along and keep...
Thomas Tuchel was wrong to blame Uefa alone for the Monaco match going ahead a day after the bomb attacks but decision-makers must start to put people ahead of schedules, TV, sponsors, money and the likePerhaps the most sensible conclusion to draw from the sorry row about who decided to reschedule a Champions League quarter-final for the day after a triple bomb attack on one of the teams, is to step back and say football should deal more maturely with trauma. It is a lesson far too long in the learning.The Borussia Dortmund manager, Thomas Tuchel, looked ashen after the 3-2 defeat against a predictably professional Monaco, claiming Uefa had high-handedly insisted the match must be played. His players needed...