AS Monaco’s Academy Director, Sébastien Muet, has previously said that La Diagonale does not sell dreams, but graduating from it opens the door to a wider world. The doors to the academy itself have now been flung open.
Monaco’s academy, La Diagonale, is internationally renowned. As Muet tells us in an interview, it is part of the Principality club’s “DNA”. The likes of Thierry Henry, David Trezeguet, and more recently Kylian Mbappé and Maghnes Akliouche have come through it, to name but a few of its graduates.
Mbappé remains Monaco’s most expensive sale of all time, whilst Akliouche, who left for Paris Saint-Germain over the summer in a €50m move, is the second-most expensive academy graduate to have been sold by the club. With Aladji Bamba also leaving Les Monégasques this summer, joining Newcastle United in a €40m move, the financial value of the continued success of the club’s academy is clear to see.
Ligue 1 rivals in panic mode?
It is increasingly important, too, in the context of a wider financial crisis in French football, which is leading other clubs to turn to their academies, albeit without the same level of success. “The economic crisis in French football, the TV rights- we won’t speak about all of that- things like that are leading some clubs today to urgently, and I mean urgently, tell themselves that player development could be an interesting economic lever. That isn’t the case at Monaco,” Muet tells us.
“The academy has existed for 50 years here. It is 50 years that the academy has been at the centre of the project. So it isn’t the economic crisis that French football is experiencing that is telling AS Monaco, our executives, ‘Let’s make the academy important.’ No, it’s the club’s culture,” added the academy director.
Muet calls it “the art of anticipation”, and whilst they are still acutely affected by the financial crisis, they are much better placed than most to overcome the structural deficits. Selling to Premier League clubs is something of a silver bullet for French clubs and so it is natural that Monaco are tailoring their academy products for that market.
Monaco embrace ‘international dimension’
“Today, there is this interesting dimension of speed, size, impact, that can sometimes interest English clubs, but not just them. The Premier League is the Premier League. When you seduce English football, it means that you seduce the whole world,” says Muet, but not all clubs in the “whole world” are capable of paying the prices that those in the Premier League have in recent years.
Exporting their academy products is a fine art that Monaco have mastered, and amid an internationalisation drive, importing from abroad is now also on the agenda. “We want to work with the French players who have the highest potential, but fundamentally, Monaco wants to have an international dimension; we have an international dimension,” says Muet.
He added, “We have an attacker who plays for the Denmark U17s (Ekene Chukwuani) who has been with us for the past two seasons. It means that there is an opening of our borders, beyond Monaco but also beyond France, too. It is quite interesting. Today, it is true that, as well as the French language, we are hearing more and more of the English language within the walls of La Diagonale.”
There is a coherence in this strategy, with the club recruiting a German, Dennis Schmitt, as manager of their Groupe Élite earlier this year. But the fundamentals of Monaco’s strategy remain unchanged; patience, as ever, remains a key ingredient. “Our objective is not to push a player to the highest level. Our objective is to establish a player at the highest level; those are two different things,” Muet tells us.
Monaco set ambitious objective
The new cohort is in the process of establishing itself in Filipe Luís’ first team set-up. The likes of Pape Cabral, Anis Soubeir, Safouane Benzahra, and Ilane Touré have all earned game time with the first team in recent months. They are not only bolstering their values – the importance of which is not negligible – but they are also – and this is key – drivers of performance in the first team, too.
Monaco Life understands that the Principality club has the objective of having 30% of academy products within the first team set-up. Sporting objectives at the club remain ambitious, and so there is no room for passengers; if they are there, they have to perform. The Groupe Élite, as well as loans at partner club Cercle Brugge, ensure that when the step to the first team is made, they are invariably ready for it.
There is an air of change at Monaco’s academy, but just as it has been throughout the Principality club’s storied history, youth development remains the cornerstone of the project.
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Photo credit: Monaco Life / Luke Entwistle