Stadium Report: Stade Louis II (AS Monaco)

In which there's many swallows and a fight

There are a lot of tax havens in the world but Monaco captures the imagination more than them all. The small principality is the by word for glitz and glamour. Whether it is Princess Grace cruising the mountains in a Ferrari or James Bond in a high stakes poker game against a maniacal terrorist, no other tax haven inspires such evocative scenery. People don’t exactly think Ferraris and Lamborghinis when they consider Andorra. It means Monaco is a place with a certain reputation and I’d say most people do want to visit it just because they want to gawk at the millionaires showing off their wealth, like looking at lions devouring a carcass at the zoo.

It offers an interesting question though. Who lives in Monaco? We know lots of millionaires and F1 drivers live there, but who’s the local? And yes, we can assume many stay there and enjoy the life of leisure from they money they have that would otherwise be funding a school, but someone has to do the normal jobs. There are police officers, there is a McDonalds, there are lots of restaurants. Someone has to that job and it’s not exactly gonna be Mr. RichMan resting in his yacht. So who are these people who you see the most of if you visit Monaco?

Well, we do have some of the answers thanks to a census. 38,367 people live in the most densely populated country on the planet, but only a third of them are Monagesque. The rest are foreign born, so you can assume they are ‘tax refugees’. And in terms of workers, the majority come from outside of Monaco. There is the town of Cap D’Ail on the border with Monaco, but there is easy access to the principality from places such as Nice, so that explains it. However, that’s when we come to the football team. AS Monaco are one of the most famous French football teams there is, and are also one of the unique teams are compete in another country’s league. But the upper classes don’t tend to be big football supporters, at the very least they typically don’t show up every week like working class fans do. And if Monaco’s working class commute in, surely they support the team from the place they live, not the team of the place they work?

Well, let’s see because I visited the Stade Louis II on two occasions in a week, once for a Ligue 1 game against Lille and then a Champions League match against Red Star Belgrade. The team itself was formed in 1924 with the merging of several different French and Monagesque sides in the region, though some argue it was actually started in 1903. It is a sports club like is normal on the continent and for the first few decades of it’s existence, it just jumped around several different amateur leagues. In the 1960s, everything changed. Maybe it was because of the extra attention given to the principality as a whole because of Grace Kelly’s marriage to Prince Rainier, but Monaco suddenly turned great, winning the Coupe de France and then the French Championship. Their next golden period was in the 1990s under Arsene Wenger. This was an era with some brilliant players as George Weah, Glenn Hoddle and Jurgen Klinsmann all featured for them. Success always does return to Monaco at some point, Didier Deschamps led them to the Champions League final in 2004 before they lost to Jose Mourinho’s FC Porto and a Radamel Falcao and Kylian Mbappe led attack won them Ligue 1 in 2017 despite PSG’s financial dominance.

Initially in black and white stripes (The red and white stripes they’d late have were designed by Grace Kelly), AS Monaco played on several pitches across Fonteville and Moneghetti. It’s worth mentioning at this point that Monaco is split into different districts, one of them being Monte Carlo. From my gathering, the two ends of Monaco are pretty distinct. Fonteville is the ‘poorer’ end of town, which feels a bit more normal. There’s a McDonalds, there’s shops you would recognise in other areas of France, it doesn’t feel like a millionaire’s paradise. Even the docks have smaller yachts and boats than the famous port you see on the F1 races. You then have Monte Carlo, which is where the casinos are and a shopping centre where the products have no price tags and instead of a Greggs in the corner, there’s a caviar place. So it makes sense that AS Monaco tended to make their home in the so called ‘poorer’ end, and by poorer I still mean that everyone who lives there can buy your life.

Eventually though Monaco needed a new stadium, so Prince Louis II ordered one be built in Fonteville and it was finished in 1939. This was built by the yachts and looked incredibly scenic. I’m sure if this stadium had still existed, it’d be up there with Como’s ground for most stunning stadiums. It would then be named after Louis II, hence the Stade Louis II. Despite hosting some big boxing matches, the 12,000 seater wasn’t the best ground around, so a new one was ordered by Prince Rainier III. This would not just be a football ground, but a sports complex as well. This was built a few hundred metres away from the site of the original Stade Louis II, just on the border with France. The old stadium was demolished and is now a cultural centre with shopping centre, museums and restaurants. This is where the Monaco McDonalds is by the way. And so on reclaimed line metres away from France, AS Monaco moved into their new home in 1985. The new Stade Louis II is a 16,360 seater, just under half the population of Monaco. Underneath the pitch is a 3,000 seater basketball arena and Olympic sized swimming pool, a testament to the clever engineering that went into the ground. The stadium became world famous as from 1998 to 2012, it was the host stadium of the UEFA Super Cup, with the Champions League draw usually being drawn in the Grimaldi Forum nearby on the same day. It has also hosted one France international, which is something considering this isn’t actually France.

So for this stadium report, I’m going to be mostly relying upon my experience of the match against Lille. I was stopping in Nice and my tip for any trip to the French Riviera is to get a Sud D’Azur pass. For €50, you get unlimited access to all trams, buses and trains in Monaco and the Alpes-Maritimes region. That stretches from Menton just past Monaco all the way to Cannes and a bit beyond. You can get this from the machines at the tram stop, though not the airport one because they want to catch out tourists. It is only a 20 minute train ride from Nice to Monaco on one of the most beautiful rail lines in the world, with stunning view after stunning view. It’s almost a tourist destination in it’s own right! I arrived at the Monte-Carlo station with plenty of time, so had a walk around Monaco for a few hours. The famous Monaco port had been taken over by a funfair and not going to lie, seeing the area usually taken up by the F1 paddocks have a donkey derby and haunted houses was a bit unusual. After a very nice meal, it was a 15 minute walk to the stadium.

It’s pretty easy to miss the stadium. If you view it from the Princes Palace, you might not even realise there’s a football stadium there. The only tell tale sign are the famous nine arches at the opposite end of the pitch. The roofs of the stands are designed to have the same villa-style roof that the buildings around it, and the outside of the stands look like they could be part of an office or an apartment block. From the view on top of Princes Palace, you might just see a flicker of green, and walking to the ground you can easily miss it. But follow the crowds and you do get there and it is at least well sign posted when you get to it. When getting there, I got a scarf from one of the stalls outside the stadium before heading into the stadium.

For such a short stadium, it’s a hell of a walk up the stairs. That’s obviously because of all the facilities that are below the pitch, but it’s a weird feeling to feel like you’re going to the away end of St James Park before emerging at the ground level of not a massive stadium. The concourse is surprisingly a bit run down on the inside, a complete contrast to the rest of the principality where you didn’t seem to see anything that was slightly old and out of place. I didn’t get anything at the concessions, but things were surprisingly cheap. You could get a bottle of beer for €5, which is remarkable considering everything around it. Actually, Monaco isn’t as daftly expensive as you think, there are the madly expensive places for the billionaires, but there are plenty of places that offer sensibly priced drinks and meals. Anyway, it was pretty easy to find my seats on the longside of the stadium.

The Stade Louis II is an iconic ground and you can feel that when you enter. The arches are an incredible sight, a throwback to the days where the UEFA Super Cup was an actually anticipated event. Those were the days when it felt like any game on TV was a big deal, so you had to watch it. Yes it is an athletics track stadium which always gets looked down on, but I find the stadiums with tracks end up having more unique architecture than standard football stadiums. Perhaps the extra space allows architects to come up with something a bit more special. Inside, the stands feel a bit more art deco, with the floodlights being hidden in the roofs of the stands. The away end, which housed a few hundred Lille fans who had made the long cross-country tip on a Friday night, is unroofed but on a pleasant French Riviera, no one could complain. Monaco does have a group of ultras who made noise throughout the game. Probably the richest ultras in the world!

As the teams came out to a pyrotechnic display, I noticed that it wasn’t just humans that come out to watch the game. Admittedly, not a lot of humans, the game was far from a sell-out with a stated attendance of 7,263 in. But there were loads of swallows which must have been attracted by the floodlights of the stadium. Throughout the match, they would be diving and swooping around, which was a nice distraction for when there were stoppages in play. The game itself was pretty entertaining, though unfortunately goalless. Monaco dominated and had several chances to take the lead, but failed to take any of them. Even Breel Embolo conspired to put a shot within the six-yard area over the bar. The biggest incident was when Monaco’s Jordan Teze decided to karate kick his opponent, with even the home fans realising that his red card was very much deserved. However, a few fans did seem to get irritated as a few rows in front of me, a man did get up, angrily shot at the person next to him before launching a punch. No idea what happened, however the punchee was the man kicked out so there’s definitely a story there. Anyway, the game would finish 0-0 even with Monaco dominating with 10 men. They got plenty of goals in the Champions League game a few days later, with Wilfred Singo scoring the best goal I’ve ever seen live.

At full time, it was a pretty easy depart. The crowds weren’t massive the traffic was standstill enough to weave through. While my Google Maps was threatening a long walk to the train station, following the locals found me an entrance to the ‘gare’ much closer to the entrance which even had people movers which gave my feet a bit to the rest. Extra trains had been put on to Nice and even though loads of people were waiting there (suggesting quite a few fans do live outside of Monaco), the massive double decker train seemed to absorb them and I had a comfortable trip back to Nice. They also put on extra trains after the Red Star Belgrade match as well and I even had time to stop by the Steak and Shake, a burger chain near Port Hercule that was pretty decent.

Stade Louis II doesn’t actually tick many boxes. It’s an athletics stadium and the fact it rarely sells out (It has only done so a few times despite being unbeaten ahead of these two games), means the atmosphere is not the greatest around. It could also do with a lick of paint and some TLC in the concourses, because the contrast of Monaco itself and the ground is a bit of a shock. But it’s an icon. It’s a throwback to the era of ITV Champions League coverage where it felt like every game was a must watch event, and a time when FIFA only had ten stadiums on it which included this one. It feels all so continental, and the environment only makes it more special and unique. If we had a tot up star rating where we measured the stadium on facilities, atmosphere etc, the Stade Louis II would probably rank lowly. But stadiums are more than just pure stats, and this one proves it.