Don't worry, they've made a play-off and got harder to Ligue 2 clubs to access to Ligue 1 in order to attract and protect investors.
over the two seasons 2004/5 and 2005/6 they spent 17 months as #1 club in the world in Sports Illustrated's power ratings. which in absence of being definitive was objective and unbiased.
I'm not sure how that's relevant to a discussion we are having in 2016. I mean come on, you can't seriously think your club is one of the elite alongside the likes of Madrid, Barcelona, Chelsea... Etc.
I agree. But there's also something distasteful to fans about how some clubs approach the sport as a purely commercial prospect. When the ticket prices in the UK cost the equivalent of a down payment on a condominium something is not right. Leicester on the other hand are showing that even a team with little resources can pull off the near impossible. Why? Because their players want it more and are willing to run themselves into the ground to get results. There was always going to be a psychological hangover from the excess of money in the EPL and this season that is becoming widely apparent. BTW, how does someone from Lyon like yourself have a thumbnail of a former PSG player?
To be fair, Monaco has slashed their budget immensely from a few years ago(didn't they sign James, Falcao and Moutinho that one year?) They still have assembled a quality side, but it's far from a team of mercenaries. I was never convinced that Monaco as a club were ever going to amount to anything just because the revenues they were bound to generate would be minuscule compared to the giants of Europe. Playing in a 20,000 seat stadium that is 75% empty doesn't help either. You aren't going to make anything on match day getting 7500 people in the door.