By David Gold
December 14 – Fallen French giants AS Monaco are set to be bought by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev (pictured), the club’s current President Etienne Franzi has said.
The crisis hit Principality outfit have been dogged by financial problems for much of the last decade.
In 2003 they were relegated from Ligue 1 by the Direction Nationale du Contrôle de Gestion (DNCG), the national body which monitors club finances, before being reinstated on appeal.
That led to the departure of their then President Jean-Louis Campora, and since he left the ownership of the club has changed hands three more times, with eight managers given the reins in the same period.
There has been pressure on Franzi and his right hand man Raymond Bella to quit the club, and now it seems as though Rybolovlev will take it off his hands.
“We have a plan designed in such a way that everything will be decided before the end of the year and it will be Mr Rybolovlev and his group,” Franzi said following a DNCG hearing, adding that it was “good news for Monaco and French football.”
Franzi then told Nice-Matin that “things are not completely done, but they are very well advanced…we are in discussions with his group.
“We hope that before the end of the year there will be a new owner of AS Monaco.”
Rybolovlev recently met the Principality’s ruler, Prince Albert, who is thought to have accepted the idea of a foreign owner taking over the debt ridden club.
Monaco have won the French title seven times and reached the Champions League final in 2004, but their decline has been steep since following the sale of key players such as Ludovic Giuly, Emmanuel Adebayor (pictured) and Patrice Evra.
They were only demoted from Ligue 1 last season, for the first time in 35 years, but 16 games into this season they are adrift at the bottom of Ligue 2 and the professional French football pyramid.
The Russian, who made his fortune in the field of magnetic therapy, is 93rd on the Forbes list of billionaires with a net worth of some $9.5 billion (£6.1 million/€7.3 million), and his money could be spent in January as AS Monaco look to avoid the drop into the third division, a league made up of a number of amateur and semi-professional teams.
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