No available cash and, above all, the obligation to realize a significant asset to cover the liabilities from last season and those anticipated in the budget forecast for the one that just started.
This is what the club’s management did by selling players with market value (Apam and Rémy) and the young Modeste, who was trained at the club and returned from a loan at Angers to eventually be sold to the Girondins de Bordeaux. This, along with the Lloris operation to OL two years ago, makes OGCN a true training club.
But due to the lack of billionaire shareholders and other adequate sources of revenue (paying spectators rarely exceed 10,000 people and marketing and sponsorship must take into account an economy primarily based on tourism and services), OGCN remains a structurally deficient club, therefore fragile, with necessary repercussions on the sports front: no budget for acquiring valuable players, wage bill under quasi-permanent control, seeking players to develop and later sell for a significant profit.
Within this framework, it is also not easy to form a team that meets the expectations of supporters and the demands of a competition where the competition remains strong.
Now that the summer transactions are behind us, we will see if the 2010-2011 vintage of the Nice club will be of quality and if the recruits (those who have already played the first four championship matches where the red and blacks are still unbeaten) and the latest ones (Digard, the Serbian Ljuboja, and the Bordeaux native Abdou Traoré who replaces another Traoré, Mahamane, who went to Metz… possibly along with the former Lyon player Clerc) will successfully replace the departures of the indispensable Apam and Rémy, not to mention Modeste.
If this is not the case, the club’s management can always console itself with a cash asset of around twenty million euros!!!
That’s how things go in the sport-business world.
But, as the law of the spectacle (be it sports) dictates, in a few months (exactly in January), there will always be the possibility of a catch-up with the winter transfer window, with other possible arrivals and departures.
Ultimately, nothing is ever lost in the (ruthless) world of football!!!
