2025-26 AS Monaco
126 · 2026-06-23 · medium
"Geographically, it's a rock shaped like a dog's head," Sacha Guidry once wrote of Monaco. "Legends say it was founded by Hercules, but it's never mentioned among his 12 famous labors. It's not a foreign city, but a city for foreigners: Englishmen, Chinese, Cubans, Hindus, Negroes, Hungarians, Finns and Egyptians. The reason they're more at home here than elsewhere is because there are no Monegasques." For The Cheat (1936), Guidry read his novel into a microphone, added Foley sound, and edited silent actor footage to generate three laughs per minute and twice as many dark-black visual gags. This was film as French literature, an avenue that future writer-directors would never truly explore in the century of cinema that followed. The Cheat is not only one of history's greatest-ever comedies because it transcends the technical limitations of its era, but its observations about Monaco (and, in turn, the Dubai and Doha of the future) described a last vestige of the Europe that might have been if there were no unifying Napoleon. Thousands of duchies, free cities, and principalities, and no footsoccer powerhouses at the FIFA World Cup. Anyway, basketball. When Association Sportive de Monaco Basket was founded in 1928, the club joined the French league because there was nowhere else for it to play. Monaco is a microstate with no income tax, so good players like UNLV "Hardway Eight" legend Robert Smith brought "national" championships to Le Rocher. After Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the club, he hired a series of former NBA starters and turned the Roca Team into a real continental threat, joining the EuroLeague in 2021 and reaching the Final Four in 2023. Then the problems started, and if you follow world events you can probably guess what they were. Rybolovlev passed control of AS Monaco Basket to fellow Russian fertilizer magnate Alexey Fedorychev in 2022; soon thereafter, both billionaires would have their assets frozen by the European Union. (Rybolovlev's name also appears thousands of times in the "Ep-Files".) During the past four years, the all-expat roster has routinely threatened strikes over unpaid wages, and the club has routinely missed administrative payments to the French hoop authorities and EuroLeague. Despite all this, somehow, they keep on winning. Monaco won the LNB Elite in 2023 and 2024, its dynasty was interrupted by Paris Basketball in 2025, and here they are again. The final contest of the five-game series – or L'Epilogue as the French call it – was Tuesday night at the Adidas Arena in Paris. The Rocas threatened to boycott, but for a different reason. Matthew Strazel, whom astute Olympic basketball observers will recognize as France's unsung hero in 2024, put up 20-and-9 to even the series in Game 4, but was suspended for Game 5 by the LNB for calling the referee un tricheur during Game 3. The appeal was denied, the team played anyway without Strazel, and Monaco erased a 12-point deficit to reclaim the national title. "What is Monaco?" Sacha Guidry rhetorically asked his readers. "It's an operetta!"
