Expect Arsene Wenger to enjoy happy return to Monaco
It’s a welcome relief for Arsenal to be favourites after years of going into the knockout stage as underdogs.
But this is another intriguing tie, not least because it sees Arsene Wenger’s return to the club where he first made his name.
Until Wenger arrived, Monaco had never made it beyond the first round in Europe. He built a side that reached the European Cup semi-final and the final of the Cup Winners’ Cup and they would surely have won the league title more than once but for the corrupt practices of their rivals Marseille.
In six years, he transformed the club. He would have gone on to manage Bayern Munich had the move not been blocked by the Monaco board. In retrospect, it is amazing he remained an unknown when he arrived at Highbury.
And yet there’s a paradox about Wenger and Monaco. He has always insisted on the importance of strict controls over football finance and condemned what he describes as financial doping. But Monaco play by a different set of rules compared to any other club in French or indeed European football.
The club plays in the French league (the state of Monaco is not a member of Uefa) but its parent company AS Monaco FC SA enjoys tax advantages worth, by some estimates, €50 million a year.
There is a long history of conflict about this tax regime. Back in the days of General Charles de Gaulle, the French even closed the frontier. The tax treaty that resulted means that French citizens have to pay income tax but foreigners are exempt.
So Monaco’s foreign players, such as Joao Moutinho, Ricardo Carvalho and Dimitar Berbatov, don’t pay tax and are much cheaper to employ. The club can also more easily afford inflated salaries, which is how they recruited Radamel Falcao before his loan to Manchester United.
For other French clubs, this is a running sore. They have even threatened to copy De Gaulle and close the football frontiers. Twelve months ago, the French league authorities, the LFP, sought to bring the dispute to a close with a deal allowing Monaco to keep their status in return for €50m, to be paid in eight stages. It satisfied the majority but seven clubs rejected the deal, among them Paris Saint-Germain and Monaco’s arch rivals along the coast, Marseille.
For PSG to object in the name of financial fair play seems a definite case of pot and kettle and Monaco’s Russian owners have being trying to reach an accommodation with Qatar Sports Investments, the owners of PSG, but so far with little success.
“We’ve got things in common,” said Monaco president Vadim Vasilyev of his PSG counterpart Nasser Al-Khelaifi, when the top clubs met last October. “We’re both outsiders, and we both have owners who have invested a lot in French football... in France it’s often said that investors should receive a warm welcome. But that’s really not how we’ve felt.”
Monaco fans feel the other clubs are simply sabre-rattling and just want a better tax deal for themselves. That could be the case but ultimately it will be up to the Conseil d’Etat, the council of state, the French supreme administrative court, to give a ruling.
Unfortunately for Monaco, this is a political as well as a judicial body and these are not the best of times for wealthy Russians to be claiming tax exemption for multimillionaires.
“It’s 50/50” says Wenger — that’s the game rather than the tax deal — but this seems to overstate the Monaco threat. They were close to setting a new low for goals scored by a team qualifying from the group stage.
In the league they are trailing in fourth place and their home record is easily the worst of the top clubs. Strong at the back, their attack has been lightweight, scoring just 26 times in 25 games. Berbatov is their top scorer — with six. Even discounting their injury problems Monaco look second best.
For Wenger it should be a reasonably comfortable return to his old haunts.
