The Roca Team’s rescue effort has taken a dramatic new turn, according to Monaco-Matin, with former NBA player Jamal Mashburn failing to deliver the funds he had promised, just a day ahead of the club’s scheduled hearing before the CNOSF. The club is now pursuing an alternative rescue plan backed by an investment group that includes Brazilian football legend Ronaldinho among its prospective shareholders.
As of Wednesday morning, with the CNOSF hearing originally set for Thursday at 10am, Monaco-Matin reports that not a single dollar of the funds Mashburn had promised had actually arrived. According to sources close to the club, all the necessary paperwork had been signed, but the substance behind it, roughly €5 million of the €10 million budget required to begin the season and satisfy the league’s financial requirements, never materialised. The outlet notes the situation echoes a similar episode involving Mashburn at Pau in 2021, raising serious doubts that the promised American funding will ever arrive.
With the Mashburn plan now widely seen as dead, general manager Oleksiy Yefimov confirmed the club is working on a backup plan, according to the report. That alternative centres on Clayton S.A., an investment fund based in Andorra that first made contact with the club on August 10, and which has now become, in Monaco-Matin’s words, the club’s last realistic chance of survival.
The Andorran-backed proposal is said to involve several individuals looking to take a stake in the club, including Monégasque businessman Romain Goiran, vice-president of the Barbagiuans, the Palace’s own football team, of which His Serene Highness Prince Albert II serves as honorary president, alongside French entrepreneur and investor Benjamin Erisoglu. Brazilian lawyers Alcides Bertaccini and Fabiana Hütten are also involved, having reportedly facilitated contact with Ronaldinho, the Brazilian football icon and former Ballon d’Or winner who played a friendly match with the Barbagiuans in Monaco last spring, and who could himself become a shareholder in the club.
Speaking to the outlet, Erisoglu, tipped as a potential future president of the club should the rescue succeed, described talks as having accelerated rapidly since Wednesday, with the group now working urgently to review the club’s financial situation and conduct a full audit.
The developments have already forced a change to the legal timeline. The CNOSF hearing originally scheduled for August 20 has now been pushed back to August 25, giving the French Basketball Federation and its financial oversight body, the DNCCG, time to review the new proposal.
Whether a rescue remains realistically possible is now genuinely uncertain, according to the report. Still, those in the Goiran-Erisoglu camp, now reportedly in direct contact with the club’s leadership, remain confident, with some suggesting that even in the event of the worst-case outcome, a confirmed refusal of Monaco’s admission into Élite or Élite 2 and relegation into France’s lower divisions, the group would still be prepared to take over the club regardless.
It marks a stunning fall for a club that little over a year ago competed in the EuroLeague final in Abu Dhabi, and which, as recently as late June, completed an unprecedented clean sweep of French basketball, winning the championship, the Leaders Cup, the Coupe de France and the SuperCoupe in the same season. Despite extensive efforts, including support from the Monegasque government, which has offered to freeze debts tied to its more than €20 million rescue loan to the club, the threat of relegation has never felt closer, following the financial collapse of the club’s benefactor, Alexei Fedorischev. “We’re going to make it,” Erisoglu told Monaco-Matin.