Samir Nasri once glided through midfields. Now his movements are being tracked through Deliveroo receipts and airline bookings.
The former Marseille, Arsenal and Manchester City midfielder is at the center of a tax battle in France, where authorities claim he owes more than 5.5 million euros in unpaid wealth and income taxes between 2018 and 2025. To prove he is fiscally resident in France rather than Dubai, investigators have turned to the minutiae of his everyday life: days spent on French soil, flight records, and hundreds of takeaway orders.
Nasri’s lawyer, Jean-Noël Sanchez, insists the case has gone too far.
He has appealed a March ruling by a Paris court that authorized the temporary seizure of some of Nasri’s bank accounts and the provisional mortgaging of one of his Paris properties as a guarantee against any future tax bill. Sanchez argues that the headline figure of 5.5 million euros is “imaginary” and that the legal fight over whether the retired playmaker actually owes anything could drag on for years.
For Sanchez, this is about more than a balance sheet.
He portrays Nasri as “a perfect French citizen” who declares his income in France and pays what is due on revenue earned there. The real issue, he says, is a broader push by the French state against high-profile residents of the United Arab Emirates.
“France has decided for Mr. Nasri — and others, for that matter — to attack all those who live in the United Arab Emirates,” Sanchez said in a phone interview. In his telling, Nasri is being used as a test case in a wider campaign.
The player’s camp maintains that his life is now anchored in the Gulf. Nasri, 38, is based in the UAE with his partner and their son, who goes to school there. “He doesn’t live in France,” Sanchez said, his frustration clear. “I am an angry lawyer because the principle of presumption of innocence is being attacked.”
French authorities see it differently.
Court documents state that Nasri spent 487 days in France between 2021 and 2023, compared with 226 days in the UAE over the same period. For tax officials, that balance of time points toward French residency, and with it, liability for French taxes on his global wealth and income.
The paperwork goes deeper still. Investigators highlighted airline reservations to and from France and, most strikingly, a pattern of food deliveries. According to the ruling, Nasri’s name is linked to 212 Deliveroo orders in 2022 alone, all sent to one of his Paris addresses. To the authorities, those orders help paint a picture of a life lived, at least substantially, in the French capital.
To the defense, they prove almost nothing.
Sanchez scoffed at the idea that takeaway meals can anchor a tax case. He argued that the state has not shown that Nasri personally placed those orders. “Did his mother place orders, his sister, his brother, his friends?” he asked, listing the possibilities that could undermine the neat narrative drawn by the tax administration.
That question cuts to the heart of the dispute: what constitutes proof of residency in an era when travel is constant, families are spread across borders, and a food delivery account can be used by half a dozen people?
“The administration might today believe that it’s on solid ground in saying that he lives in France but it will have to prove that,” Sanchez said. “And that is not going to be proven by the 212 Deliveroos.”
For now, the assets remain under provisional lock and key, the tax bill looms in the background, and one of France’s most gifted modern midfielders finds his future entangled not with a club or a coach, but with a judge’s reading of his digital footprint.
