YOU could call it The Roque Santa Cruz Stage. Or perhaps The Adrian Mutu Stage. Or maybe The Javier Pastore Stage.
It is the stage a football club reaches when, following a takeover by a massively wealthy investor, it suddenly finds itself flush with cash and able to sign players who would previously have been out of reach. It is a time of breathless transfer speculation, cheery player unveiling photos and wall-to-wall optimism; a time when it is still too early to know whether your new striker will prove to be the next Didier Drogba or the next Mateja Kežman.
Nice arrived at this stage on August 26 when British billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s petrochemical company INEOS completed its protracted €100 million takeover of the club, which joined Swiss second-tier side Lausanne-Sport and cycling outfit Team Ineos in the firm’s sporting stable. News of the takeover’s impending finalisation prompted talk of a major transfer splurge, but with the deal going through a few days before the close of the summer transfer window, Nice only managed to get a handful of new players through the door. Kasper Dolberg was the headline acquisition, signing from Ajax in a club-record €20.5 million deal.
Arsenal are preparing to interview up to 10 candidates for Unai Emery's replacement with former captain Patrick Vieira emerging as a serious contender despite a difficult season at Nice.
— Bolarinwa Olajide (@iambolar) December 11, 2019
In truth, Nice’s new-look management team made it clear from the outset that the club’s fans should not expect any gung-ho behaviour in the transfer market. President Jean-Pierre Rivère explained that although the backing of Ratcliffe, Britain’s richest man, will naturally enable Nice to buy more players, a more important consequence is that it will also make it easier for the club to hold onto players that it does not want somebody else to buy.
"The big difference compared to before is that we didn’t have means,” Rivère told L’Équipe in August. “Today, we have controlled means, but we have more means. We have the capacity to ‘do’ a Dolberg. Before, it would have been a loan with no option to buy, so it wouldn’t have been possible. We’ll have access to players to whom we didn’t have access before. But [player] trading is not the objective of everything. When we sign young players, it’s to make them grow and keep them for as long as possible. Today, we have the means to keep our youngsters. Before, we sold them because we had to in order to live."
The incoming transfers that Nice completed at the end of August reflected the club’s new principle of prioritising the recruitment of players aged no older than 23, with Dolberg (22) followed through the door by Stanley Nsoki (20), Alexis Claude-Maurice (21), Hicham Boudaoui (20), Adam Ounas (23) and Khéphren Thuram (18).
But although Dolberg is living up to his billing, with five goals in his first 12 Ligue 1 appearances, the Denmark international’s fellow new recruits have not yet enjoyed the same success. Ounas, a loan signing from Napoli, and Claude-Maurice, who arrived after a superb season in Ligue 2 with Lorient, have both struggled for fitness, while former Paris Saint-Germain left-back Nsoki has looked out of his depth, Algeria international Boudaoui has barely featured and Thuram – youngest son of former France defender Lilian – has made only one first-team start.
BREAKING: Nice have announced that Youcef Atal has suffered a knee injury that will keep him out "for a long time".
Any prospects of a move to Chelsea in January are surely shelved with this news. #CFC pic.twitter.com/LpKc7h9QkC
— Robin Bairner (@RBairner) December 8, 2019
The mixed fortunes of Nice’s new boys have found an echo in the team’s results. Patrick Vieira achieved a minor miracle in his first season as head coach by steering Les Aiglons (‘The Eaglets’) to a seventh-place finish despite his side scoring only 30 goals over the course of the entire campaign. Nice are a more intimidating prospect in the attacking third this season, but an increase in their goal-scoring capacity has been offset by a startling loss of solidity at the other end of the pitch. Having boasted the second-best defence in Ligue 1 last season, Vieira’s men currently possess the fourth most porous back line in the division and have kept only one clean sheet in all competitions since the beginning of the campaign.
Vieira has not been helped by injuries to key members of his defence (a serious knee injury sustained by Algerian right-back Youcef Atal, last season’s Ligue 1 revelation, being the most recent blow), but the former Arsenal captain’s constant rotation of defensive personnel has arguably been a contributory factor as well.
Nice sat third in Ligue 1 after six matches of the season, only for a run of five games without victory in September and October to send them sliding into the bottom half of the table. Vieira was unable to disguise his anger following a 4-1 loss to Claude Puel’s Saint-Étienne at the start of December, branding his team’s performance “catastrophic”. But Nice bounced back by beating Metz by the same scoreline last weekend, midfielder Wylan Cyprien claiming a double, and despite lying in 13th place ahead of Saturday’s trek across France to Brest, the underwhelming performance levels of Ligue 1’s top-half clubs (PSG and, arguably, second-place Marseille aside) mean that they are only five points off the Champions League positions.
INEOS’s first foray into European football got off to a less than auspicious start when Lausanne were relegated from the Swiss top flight in the first season of the new owners’ tenure. The INEOS hierarchy identified its own lack of football know-how as a contributory factor in Lausanne’s struggles and moved to avoid a repeat at Nice by reappointing Rivère as president and Julien Fournier as director of football. Both men had left the club in January after falling out with previous owner Chien Lee.
Bob Ratcliffe, Jim’s younger brother, heads up the INEOS football operation and has warned that it will take “three to five years” of patient, prudent investment for Nice to achieve the owners’ primary objectives of becoming an established top-four Ligue 1 club and a regular competitor in European football.
However the season pans out, this is only the beginning.
