[Sport] Paul Mitchell dusts off Tottenham blueprint in Monaco reconstruction project

[-Apex]

Paul Mitchell dusts off Tottenham blueprint in Monaco reconstruction project
Fresh from spells at Southampton, Tottenham and Red Bull it is now Mitchell’s job to bring the cycle of boom and bust at the Ligue 1 club to an end

The view from the window of Paul Mitchell’s office provides a neat visual metaphor for the task he took on when he was appointed sporting director of Monaco in June last year.

Yards away beyond the glass, the finishing touches are being applied to the club’s brand new performance centre. Nestling against a rockface in the old stone quarry that has been Monaco’s training base since 1981, the gleaming, state-of-the-art facility has been constructed at a cost of €55million and is due to be completed in March.

As workmen scuttle around the site, Mitchell continues work on his own building project. Renowned as one of Europe’s leading talent-spotters following his spells at Southampton, Tottenham and RB Leipzig, the 39-year-old Mancunian was tempted away from his role as technical director of Red Bull’s football division last summer by the ambitious vision of Monaco’s billionaire owner Dmitry Rybolovlev and the appeal of being able to once again focus all his energy upon a single club. In return, he was charged with the responsibility of putting down solid foundations in a place of shifting sands. Ligue 1 champions and Champions League semi-finalists in 2017, Monaco were nearly relegated in 2019 and finished last season in ninth place after the French championship was prematurely curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic. They have also had four coaches in the last two years. It is Mitchell’s job to bring the cycle of boom and bust to an end.

“I’ve got to try and find a way to bring back the success, but make that success sustainable – not hitting the heights of the [Champions League] semi-finals and then nearly getting relegated,” he tells The Independent in a video interview. “The foundations are the crucial part. Monaco gets accused of being very volatile and we need to change that.”

An uncompromising workaholic (he confesses he can be a “nightmare” to work with), Mitchell arrived in time to make a few adjustments to the plans for the performance centre, notably adding sleep pods to the first-team players’ area in order to aid recovery. He has extensively reshaped Monaco’s support staff too, with James Bunce, who worked with Mitchell at Southampton and has also worked for the Premier League and the US Soccer Federation, coming in as director of performance.

Mitchell made his most eye-catching staffing decision within weeks of taking up the role, dismissing Robert Moreno as head coach in late July and replacing the former Spanish national team boss – who had been in the job for less than seven months – with Niko Kovač. The former Bayern Munich coach’s commitment to high-energy football reminded Mitchell of Mauricio Pochettino, who he helped to bring to Southampton in 2013 during his spell as head of recruitment there. But it was a question of substance as well as style.

“It was similar to when we did the profiling to bring Mauricio to Southampton,” Mitchell says. “We wanted to see a certain brand of football. Under Robert the team was quite low-energy – it seemed to physically decrease in certain points in games, past the hour-mark – and we wanted to play with this vibrant, aggressive, linear, modern-day philosophy. Niko has that and he’s coached that for many years. Plus he has experience of winning leagues, playing for trophies and managing high-status players day in, day out.”