Villareal, Monaco no strangers to playing with big boys in Champions League

The football clubs from these pinprick spots on the map of Europe have reached a Champions League final and a semi-final. Safe to say they more than punch their weight.

Monaco's Colombian forward Radamel Falcao celebrates after scoring during the Champions League Third qualifying round football match between Monaco and Fenerbahce on August 3, 2016, at the Louis II stadium in Monaco. (AFP)Show less

In terms of what they bring to club football’s elite competition, Villarreal and Monaco are of a type. In Uefa Champions League play where big cities typically predominate, they buck a trend. The town of Vila-real counts up its citizens and comes up with a total shy of 50,000. Monaco is densely populated, but what Monegasques call home is a tiny area, just over two square kilometres, and there fewer of them even than there are Vila-real folk.

Yet this century, the football clubs from these pinprick spots on the map of Europe have reached a Champions League final – Monaco lost 3-0 to Porto in 2004 – and a semi-final, Villarreal’s tight defeat to Arsenal two years later. Safe to say they more than punch their weight.

Monaco is helped, of course, by the idiosyncrasies of the Principality they represent, with its favourable tax arrangements and the fact that the club’s chief patron, the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, chose to domicile himself there.

Villarreal are also grateful to benefactors whose generosity makes up for a small fanbase. The Roig family – Fernando Roig is president, his brother the chief executive – have propelled a club from the lower reaches of the Spanish professional structure to regular participation in European competition. They have done so without being swanky.

Villarreal do spend, but they also recruit sagely and sell well. Eric Bailly, the Ivory Coast defender, would be the latest in a line of witnesses to that. Bailly joined Manchester United this summer for a fee of £30 million (Dh143m). Villarreal had paid barely one sixth of that to make him theirs 18 months earlier. That sort of strategising is bound to be admired.

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Monaco, who under Rybolovlev have swung from extremes of aggressive spending to careful cutbacks, poached the long-serving Villarreal director of sport Antonio Cordon this summer.

Cordon had only been in his new job at Monaco a few weeks when fate conspired. His former club and his Ligue 1 employers were brought together for tonight’s tie, a Champions League pre-qualifier with much at stake, not least the budget-shaping income that comes from participation in the group stage.

Cordon may well be able to advise, with unique expertise, the Monaco coach Leonardo Jardim on some of Villarreal’s perceived frailties, but the setup he said goodbye to in late June, after 17 years on the valenciano coast, has altered substantially in the last few weeks.

The manager Marcelino, who guided Villarreal to fourth place in last season’s Primera Liga, left suddenly, apparently because of confrontations with senior players and some disagreements with the board about signings.

Fran Escriba has taken over, his aim tonight to maintain, at the very least, the strong home record Marcelino oversaw at the Madrigal arena in continental competition.

They won every home match in last term’s run to the semi-final of the Europa League.

Besides dealing with a new coach, plunged into the role with pre-season well advanced, Villarreal have injury problems.

The Italian defender Daniele Bonera has been added to a list of absentees that includes Jonathan Dos Santos and centre-forward Robert Soldado, who is out for up to six months with a cruciate ligament rupture. One possibility to lead the line in Soldado’s absence would be Alex Pato, formerly of AC Milan.

His summer signing has provoked much questioning. Pato, the Brazilian former prodigy, spent a very unproductive six months at Chelsea from January.

There he spent a good deal of time away from the pitch with Radamel Falcao, who is back at Monaco after two seasons on loan in England, with Manchester United and then Chelsea.

Like Pato, Falcao hopes to recapture some of the zip and venom of old.

There were hints of that when he contributed two goals to the aggregate win over Fenerbahce that pushed Monaco into tonight’s play-off.

Alas, for Falcao, a hamstring problem sustained in the second leg against the Turkish club put him back in recuperation again.

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