Nice's record transfers under INEOS ownership

While he was still CEO of Nice, Sir Jim Ratcliffe's brother Bob outlined what makes «an INEOS player».

«People who can work hard for the team, track back, those sorts of characteristics,» the younger Ratcliffe vaguely explained following INEOS's takeover of the French club in 2019. «It is important to put on attractive football, where you see something special.»

These bland platitudes, combined with a flood of sporting directors with wildly contrasting backgrounds, have concocted a confused transfer strategy for the Ligue 1 side owned by Manchester United's new minority shareholder.

Here's a look at the club's biggest buys under INEOS and Ratcliffe and how they have fared.

Just two weeks after getting sent off for Lokomotiv Moscow while playing in the capital of a nation at war, Alexis Beka Beka was starting for Nice against Toulouse.

The young Parisian scored a memorable goal in Nice's Europa Conference League play-off to secure his club a place in the competition's group stage but has struggled for game time since. Unlike New York or Jay-Jay Okoacha, Beka Beka seems to have been named twice for reasons aside from his quality.

Not every gamble can pay off. Real Madrid's former sporting director once told the club's president, Florentino Perez, that three in five transfers are failures. In terms of pure finances, N'Soki falls into this majority for Nice.

After two muddled seasons at the club, amid a prodigious turnover of personnel, N'Soki was sold to Club Brugge for almost half the fee Nice paid Paris Saint-Germain. One short year later, with N'Soki now a starter for the Belgian champions, Brugge doubled their money by offloading N'Soki to Hoffenheim. Ouch.

Across his debut season on the French Riviera, Nice didn't keep a