MONACO — Monaco may seem almost comically tiny, less a real country than a glorified safe deposit box festooned with palm trees and Lamborghini dealerships, but it teems with interesting statistics. Population: 35,427. Number of nationalities represented: 125. Unemployment rate: 0 percent. Income tax rate: 0 percent.

Number of soccer-team-owning Russian billionaires feuding with French soccer officials: one.

That would be Dmitri Rybolovlev, a potash fertilizer tycoon who in 2011 expressed his support for his adopted country by buying a majority stake in its struggling soccer team, A.S. Monaco, and proceeding to aggressively vacuum up expensive European players.

Deep-pocketed foreign owners, like Roman Abramovich at Chelsea and the Qatar Investment Authority at Paris St.-Germain, are a euro a dozen over here these days. But Monaco is different from other countries. Rybolovlev can offer players not just hefty wages, the chance to hobnob with other rich sportspeople, and the excitement of living in a sunny place that takes just 45 minutes to walk across (more, if you stop for lunch): he can offer them liberation from the petty annoyance of income tax.

This is a happy prospect no matter what you earn; it begins to look like bliss when you count your income in millions. And it puts the rest of the French league at a significant disadvantage. While Monaco basks in its special tax status, players for French teams are subject to the kind of high tax rates that recently motivated the actor Gérard Depardieu to renounce his citizenship, acquire a Russian passport and lumber screaming for the non-French hills of Belgium.