Nice’s record transfers under INEOS ownership

While he was still CEO of Nice, Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s brother Bob outlined what makes “an INEOS player”.

“People who can work hard for the team, track back, those sorts of characteristics,” the younger Ratcliffe vaguely explained following INEOS’s takeover of the French club in 2019. “It is important to put on attractive football, where you see something special.”

These bland platitudes, combined with a flood of sporting directors with wildly contrasting backgrounds, have concocted a confused transfer strategy for the Ligue 1 side owned by Manchester United’s new minority shareholder.

Here’s a look at the club’s biggest buys under INEOS and Ratcliffe and how they have fared.

Just two weeks after getting sent off for Lokomotiv Moscow while playing in the capital of a nation at war, Alexis Beka Beka was starting for Nice against Toulouse.

The young Parisian scored a memorable goal in Nice’s Europa Conference League play-off to secure his club a place in the competition’s group stage but has struggled for game time since. Unlike New York or Jay-Jay Okoacha, Beka Beka seems to have been named twice for reasons aside from his quality.

Not every gamble can pay off. Real Madrid’s former sporting director once told the club’s president, Florentino Perez, that three in five transfers are failures. In terms of pure finances, N’Soki falls into this majority for Nice.

After two muddled seasons at the club, amid a prodigious turnover of personnel, N’Soki was sold to Club Brugge for almost half the fee Nice paid Paris Saint-Germain. One short year later, with N’Soki now a starter for the Belgian champions, Brugge doubled their money by offloading N’Soki to Hoffenheim. Ouch.

Across his debut season on the French Riviera, Nice didn’t keep a single clean sheet in any match Mattia Viti started.

Signed as an understudy to the ageing Dante, Viti could not nudge his left-footed captain out of the XI. Still only 21, Viti is on loan with Sassuolo this season – although, the Serie A side do have an option to buy.

INEOS announced their arrival by snapping up the best young talent from the French second tier in 2019. Lorient’s Alexis Claude-Maurice had scored 14 goals as a 20-year-old that year. Across his subsequent four years in the top flight, he has mustered a combined ten goals.

Claude-Maurice admitted: “I was putting too much pressure on myself and I hadn’t anticipated the difficulties,” during his debut campaign but Nice’s new owners were suckered in by his unsustainable goal haul.

During his stellar season in Ligue 2, Claude-Maurice out-performed his expected goals by the second-largest margin in the entire division. No wonder he couldn’t replicate that hot streak against considerably better players.

After firing wide of the mark with a number of promising talents, Nice leaned upon proven output in the summer of 2022.

Gaetan Laborde was still playing in the French third tier when he was 20 but has blossomed into one of Ligue 1’s most consistent forwards in his later years. Boasting double digits for league goals in three of his previous four seasons before Nice secured his services, Laborde duly notched 13 goals in his debut campaign – more than double any other teammate.

With more than 100 senior appearances to his name and already a Dutch international when Nice snapped him up aged 22, the future looked bright for Calvin Stengs.

Getting lost on the wing during his solitary year in France, Stengs has been rejuvenated upon his reunion with Arne Slot at Feyenoord this summer. Much like N’Soki, Nice took a significant hit on Stengs, selling him to the Dutch champions for less than half what they paid AZ two years earlier.

There is no doubt that Jeremie Boga is an outrageously talented footballer. Across the last year, he has averaged a staggering 4.4 completed dribbles per 90 minutes. For comparison, Lionel Messi – arguably the greatest weaver of his generation – has clocked 2.9 per 90 in the same time period.

Yet, there is the sense that the French-born winger hasn’t fulfilled his potential. Gian Piero Gasperini, Boga’s manager at Atalanta, sighed: “He has extraordinary qualities that he must be able to make available to the team, he must be a more complete player.” It remains to be seen if Nice can extract his full talent.

Just three days after Ratcliffe and INEOS took over the club, Kasper Dolberg signed from Ajax for £18m. Nice’s most expensive acquisition prior to the takeover had been Danilo Barbosa one year earlier for less than half that fee.

Within two months of his arrival, Dolberg had a £62,000 watch stolen from the dressing room by his teammate Lamine Diaby-Fadiga. At the next match, Nice fans unveiled a banner which roughly translated to: “Lamine, make sure you’re on time at your job centre appointment.”

Despite a sticky start, Dolberg’s best season at Nice was his debut campaign, never getting close to his 11 league goals thereafter.

The rivalry between Nice and Monaco on the French Riviera is not particularly fierce – there just aren’t enough people in the principality to cause too much uproar.

Sofiane Diop crossed the subdued divide in the summer of 2022. Despite missing much of spring with a sprained knee, the dainty number ten finished as the club’s joint-leading assist provider in his debut campaign.

When Ligue 1 stopped for the 2022 World Cup, only three players had hit double digits for goals. PSG’s Kylian Mbappe and Neymar led the way while Lorient’s Terem Moffi boasted ten of his own.

Nice had only scored 15 as an entire team at the time and duly secured Moffi’s services with an initial loan that January before a permanent move last summer. Despite getting on the end of better chances in a Nice shirt, Moffi’s finishing hot streak has deserted him on the Mediterranean coast.

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