Brun Leaves Monaco With A Suitcase
Guillaume Brun, seven league games in two seasons at AS Monaco, has joined Hamburger SV for £11.5m — and nobody in the principality is reaching for the smelling salts.
Seven. That is the number of club games Guillaume Brun managed in a Monaco shirt, and it explains why the £11.5m Hamburger SV have just paid for him has raised eyebrows in Germany rather than fury in France.
Brun, 25, arrived at Monaco in 2061/62 and leaves this month with two goals to show for his time. Not two a season. Two, full stop. A club known far beyond its borders, with a cabinet of thirty major titles, is not supposed to lose sleep over a forward who spent two years mostly watching. Monaco, one suspects, will file the paperwork briskly and put the money towards something more urgent.
For Hamburg the calculation is different. Here is a club with a worldwide following and a proper sense of its own history, and yet the fee is modest by Bundesliga standards — less than the £15.5m they spent on Antonio from Mallorca a fortnight ago. Two attacking arrivals in a fortnight suggests Simon Borsdorf's side are being rebuilt rather than merely topped up. Whether Brun repays that faith is another matter; seven appearances is not a body of work, it is a rumour.
"I wanted somewhere I could play," Brun might reasonably say, and one hopes he does, because Hamburg will want more than gratitude for the chance. The club's supporters have seen enough of the past to recognise a project when it is presented to them, and enough of the present to ask why a man with two goals in two years is part of it.
The answer, presumably, is that Monaco never really let him. A player who cannot get into a side is not necessarily a player without a future; he is a player without a present. Hamburg have bought the future on the cheap and are entitled to feel pleased with themselves.
Brun will not be alone in the dressing room, either. Pavel Kalchev has just been named German Players' Newcomer of the Year, and a club with that kind of young talent around it can afford a gamble or two. The eyebrows in Germany may settle. The ones in Monaco have already moved on.