AS Monaco’s sporting director: we are now more aggressive team

By Antonio Torres del Cerro

La Turbie, France, Sep 29 (EFE).- AS Monaco sporting director Paul Mitchell has implemented a shift in the club’s philosophy from possession-based football to aggression since joining the Ligue 1 club a year and a half ago.

This change is paying off, as Monaco ended last season third in the league, returning to the European stage after a two-season absence.

 After being denied a chance to compete in the Champions League by Shakhtar Donetsk, the team had a good start to their Europa League campaign by defeating Sturm Graz 1-0.

In an interview with Efe, the Englishman discussed the revolution that he has helped set in motion.

Q: In the year and a half you have spent at the club, what general changes have you implemented?

A: We changed pro-actively all of the conditioning philosophy. We changed all the medical philosophy. We became very pro-active; the recovery strategies, the nutrition strategies, every strategy that helps performance, we changed.

We hired a director of performance to oversee this, working with myself, where I had a new technical director to look at how we recruited players and how they could align with the vision of the president and myself. We brought the average age of the team to be one of the youngest in the big five leagues.

 As everybody has seen, we changed the philosophy from being, let’s say, a more possession-based team to being a very physically proactive team, pressing from the front, having controlled aggression, being very fast in our movement and in our counter-press and our action from the offensive.

Everything I would say that fell under performance, we looked, we analyzed, we adjusted and we changed.