During the proclamation of the European Golden Boy and the European Golden Girl organized by Tuttosport in Rome at Casina Poste, the general director of Monaco spoke Thiago Dark. These are his words: “It is a pleasure to be here on behalf of myself and all of Monaco, we are proud to have five players among the nominees who testify to our journey with young people. Everything we do in Monaco is to make the team as competitive as possible, not to make money or capital gains. It all comes from our very aggressive idea of football, we need to have patience to wait for the player’s growth on and off the pitch. The objective is to make Monaco as competitive as possible with the budget at our disposal and to do this we had to focus on young people.
We have excellent infrastructure with a sports center dedicated exclusively to the youth sector, with also the school inside to best develop the player from every point of view. Then we work to train the player within our structure and our culture. All the people who work at Monaco must understand that this is the main objective of the club, we must enhance the players to make Monaco better. Getting into the top three every year in Ligue 1 is difficult but fundamental because our goal is to always play in the Champions League. The school is fundamental both for the culture but also for the discipline of the footballer himself. Having the school within the club is also essential to better manage the needs of the players and make the management of commitments more flexible. For us, what we need for training is different from what we need in the first team. We work hard to have coaches who know how to work with every age group, I come from Brazil and ten years ago football specialized in tactics too early, taking away the imagination of the kids. There is time to teach tactics in the Primavera or in the second team, but if there is no technique you cannot teach it in the Primavera or even in the first team. There is a need both for work with young people from the youth sector and with 16-17 year olds who come from other teams.
We have started working with the scouts for the boys who have yet to reach the first team. Ben Seghir did all the training in Munich, but then there are also players we signed who weren’t yet playing in the first team like Ilenikhena in Antwerp. If we had waited another season he would no longer be a player for Monaco. Ben Seghir is a special case, at 16 he was without a team and now he has become a player who has chosen the Morocco national team and scored a brace in four minutes. The French market is fundamental for us, when I arrived at Monaco I didn’t know French football. Today we have a scouting department that works only on the French market and another department on the rest of the world, I didn’t know French football and for me it is essential to have knowledge of the domestic market. I also really believe in the talent that exists in Brazil and South America, but we need to control the number of foreigners that can be brought to France. Our goal is to play the Champions League every year, this year we are back after five years and a team like Monaco must participate every year. The desire is to achieve this continuity with aggressive football and with young players.”