On the face of it, there are plenty of reasons why someone in Roberto Mancini's position – ambitious, driven, with a love of the good life – might be attracted to the beautiful scenery along the Côte d'Azur, the climate, the yacht-choked port and, naturally, all the tax perks that go with living in Monaco.

Thanks to the immense wealth of Dmitry Rybolovlev, there is also good reason to believe it will not be too long before AS Monaco's upward trajectory brings the success the Russian billionaire craves, with the kind of financial backing that demands to be taken seriously.

Rybolovlev, for those not familiar with the name, made his fortune out of fertiliser, selling his stake in Uralkali for £4.1bn in June 2012 and now comes in at 100th in the Forbes rich-list.

As well as a mansion in Monaco and a sleek 165-footer on the water, you can probably get an accurate measure of the man by the fact he has paid £62m to buy Maison de L'Amitié, Donald Trump's old pad in Florida, with its 18 bedrooms and private beach. Add in the apartment overlooking Central Park – at £55m the most expensive in New York – and it is fair to say the Rybolovlev family has not done too badly.

But then you remember Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan and the rest of the Abu Dhabi United Group are not exactly doing too shabbily either, and it makes you wonder what, specifically, should make the Italian negotiate with Monaco last season about becoming their new manager. Was he actually serious about severing his ties with City? Or was it because he suspected they might dispose of him if he failed to win them the league?

Monaco's firm belief is that he fancied joining the Rybolovlev revolution come what may. More likely, however, is that his dalliance with the Ligue 2 club, over the course of three months of secret negotiations, was Mancini making contingency plans in case City's owners decided to let him go. Streetwise and political, Mancini knows acutely well how his business works.

It is certainly revealing that the meeting, in which Monaco came away thinking they had their man, took place in Rome shortly after the 1-0 defeat against Arsenal that left City eight points behind Manchester United, with only six games to go. After that defeat, Mancini spent a long time discussing the future of Mario Balotelli, who had been sent off in disgrace. In hindsight, it might have been more appropriate to ask the manager about his own position.

He would have been justified, too, in having misgivings about the tolerance levels of the club's owners, particularly as City had not made it out of their Champions League group. Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the sheikh's right-hand man and chairman of the club, is not trigger-happy, or unrealistic, and wants to do the right thing by his more valued employees. Yet it is a simple fact of life that billionaire businessmen don't usually have much patience when staff fall short of their job requirements.

Mancini, after all, has first-hand experience of this from his time in Serie A, when he won three titles for Internazionale but still found himself ushered towards the door – Operation Mourinho, it was known as – because he was unable to get them past the Champions League quarter-finals. He had tried to engineer his own departure from the San Siro, following up a defeat against Liverpool in 2008 by announcing it would be his final season.

Massimo Moratti, the owner, talked him out of it, then decided to move him on anyway. At this level, as Mancini knows only too well, management can be a cut-throat business.

After that Arsenal defeat, the word was that Mancini's future was potentially vulnerable again, effectively hinging on how the final six games of the season went. The message was clear: if they tailed off and finished even further behind United, a change in manager had to be considered an option.

What nobody knew at the time was that United would lose at Wigan Athletic, draw 4-4 with Everton after leading 4-2, lose again at City and that, ultimately, it would be blue and white adorning the open-top bus that inched its way through Manchester the following week, rather than red and white. Around March and April, though, it would have been perfectly normal if a little insecurity had crept into Mancini's mind. The suspicion has to be that he recognised the dangers in advance.

Monaco might seem a strange choice, not even playing in the top tier of French football at the moment. On the other hand, there is obvious potential for the club to progress under their new owner. Living in Monaco would have appealed to a man of Mancini's tastes. He does not dislike Manchester or the climate of northern England in the way that, say, Carlos Tevez does. Then again, he does not particularly like it, either.

Equally, Mancini must know that leaving City for all but maybe three or four other clubs these days would represent a step down. Their difficulties acclimatising to the Champions League have become a considerable disappointment, to say the least, but there is still an enormous amount going for the club, and a sense that they are only in the early stages of the Abu Dhabi master plan.

Mancini can often give the impression he is dissatisfied with the work of people above him, arguing that he should be given more power in transfer business and deserves, in short, the same level of control that Sir Alex Ferguson holds at Manchester United. Yet it is quite common for managers to have differences of opinions with administrators, as Mancini has had with Brian Marwood and, previously, Garry Cook.

Mancini has always made it his business to have a direct line into the club's owners – the real decision-makers – in a way that his predecessor, Mark Hughes, never did. What they did not realise was that, as City and United went head to head for the league title last season, he was simultaneously contemplating joining Monaco.