Monaco Owner Dmitry Rybolovlev Sells Leonardo da Vinci Painting for Record Fee
AS Monaco majority owner Dmitry Rybolovlev has made his biggest ever sale, but it comes not in the form of a football transfer.
The summer saw an exodus of key players depart the club in the form of Tiemoue Bakayoko, Bernardo Silva and Benjamin Mendy.
Despite bringing recouping a huge amount on sales, however, Rybolovlev made a world-record sale of £340m for a Leonardo da Vinci piece of artwork in a New York auction.
The enormous sum of cash is more than double what Paris Saint-Germain will pay Monaco at the end of Kylian Mbappe's loan - another key player who left in the summer.
The Russian billionaire purchased the 'Salvator Mundi' painting in 2013 for just £97m.
Monaco won the Ligue 1 title last season for the first time in seventeen years, finishing above PSG - themselves owned by billionaires - by eight points in a season which was a masterpiece in its own right.
Leonardo Jardim's side also reached the semi-finals of the Champions League, knocking out the likes of Borussia Dortmund and Manchester City.
It remains to be seen whether Rybolovlev funnels sum of the money back into the football club. Monaco made sales almost reaching £160m - excluding Mbappe - in the summer, but spent little over £90m on arrivals.
This season, Monaco have been unable to replicate their form in Europe, but remain firmly in the title chase, four points adrift of the resurgent Parisiens.
