Translated material
Hockey: a new national project?
Eight corporations invest in open hockey league project
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Hockey as a new national project. While the Russians long and difficultly moved from the meeting of the New Year to Christmas and from it to the meeting of the Old New Year, the Russian hockey championship entered, as it turned out, its last year. This fall it will be replaced by the Russian Open Hockey League (ORHL). On January 15, at a meeting chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Naryshkin, the foundations for its existence will be approved
Why at such a high level, you ask? Yes, because the sports minister Vyacheslav Fetisov lobbied for this idea not through anyone, but directly through the president. He, they say, promised to attend the final of the Moscow World Cup in May - if the Russian team got there. But our team got, alas, only to the third place, which, as it turned out, upset a lot of people in the Kremlin. Fetisov, after all, has been pushing through the project of a new hockey league for several years, proposing to call it the Eurasian Hockey League and make it capable of competing with the NHL itself over time - so that fewer talented players leave us overseas. But before the World Cup, hockey at home was somewhat on the periphery of state interests. And only after the insulting defeat in the World Cup semi-finals from the Finns, it became clear that our hockey needed changes, and urgent ones at that. For, as stated in the first working version of the ORHL project, in Russia:
- insufficient pace of development of hockey;
- poor results of national teams in the international arena;
– decrease in the level of training of players;
– weak competition between clubs
and the most important thing:
– irrational use by clubs of their financial resources – all this requires a new structure and a new league.
From the oligarchs on a thread ...
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Even Vladimir Ilyich taught us (hardly, though, referring to hockey) competent accounting and control. And this is what his followers, the ideological inspirers of the new project, learned from this teaching. “Today, public and private companies are investing significant amounts of money in Russian hockey, thus financing clubs, national teams, hockey federations, and various tournaments. This funding is poorly controlled, and therefore investments do not bring any sporting or commercial results. OR HL is created as a business project. This will allow control over the financing of hockey and increase the return on investment.”
It is reasonable, who would argue. But where would you get money for such a good idea? Since the time of the same Vladimir Ilyich, there have been and are much more hunters to control other people's funds, and not only in sports, than those who want to invest their own. But in the proposed version, it turns out that it is not supposed to take anything from anyone or anything. The state will provide the money. And it will give you a lot. For the alleged shareholders of CJSC OR HL will be the largest state-owned or near-state companies and banks. So far, eight companies have been invited to join the project. These are Rosgosstrakh, Ingosstrakh, Gazprom, Rosoboronexport, Transneft, VEB, VTB and Russian Railways. They are subject to the following quitrent: the entrance fee will be $ 5 million each, the same will be the size of the annual fee for the next five years. For this, companies will receive 55% plus one share. Another 25% plus one share will be owned by the Russian Hockey Federation, and 20% will go to the clubs - they, in turn, will need 1 million entry fee each (seasonal has not yet been registered in any way). There should be at least 20 clubs, that's how many the Russian championship is playing now, but the declared openness of the new league naturally implies the participation of millionaire foreign clubs. To do this, they must explain what the deductions will be directly to the prize fund of the tournament. So far there is not a word about it anywhere.
Roy Medvedev
The first three years of the five-year business plan will be devoted to "debugging all the mechanisms of the work of the OR HL." During this time it is planned:
– structure the financing program for the league and the Russian Hockey Federation (RHF) (the federation itself is not required to engage in commercial activities);
– create a strong and effective league management structure;
- prepare the league budget, including the FHR cost estimate;
– to ensure the qualitative development of professional players and coaches, thereby increasing the sports level of competitions and the interest of fans;
– increase viewer interest by attracting TV, the Internet and modern marketing technologies; – study the experience of international leagues and federations;
– work towards promoting cooperation with the NHL and European leagues;
– introduce modern technologies for running a sports business to gradually reduce financial support from state-owned companies.
And finally, for you - the composition of the organizing committee: Sergey Naryshkin (chairman), Vyacheslav Fetisov, Vladislav Tretiak, Alexander Medvedev, Pavel Krasheninnikov. Among these five officials, only a member of the board of directors of Gazprom, Mr. Medvedev - as president of the HK SKA (St. Petersburg) - is directly related to club hockey, for the sake of the rapid prosperity of which, in general, everything is started. And he had already managed to throw out the key phrase: "Even if one of the companies for some reason cannot participate in the financing of the project, nothing terrible will happen." This should be understood in such a way that other state-owned companies are already pushing in the honorary queue for the implementation of the state task, and their list is likely to expand in the near future. And of course, it was simply impossible not to introduce a person with such a surname into the leadership of the nascent national project: he calls, for example, to some Rosoboronexport and says: “Hello to you, this is Medvedev, why are you slow there with listing the tasks assigned to you? five million, huh? And there everyone instantly speeds up - it is only important that they do not mix up the score out of fright. Although it’s not scary in principle: if they realize that they made a mistake, they won’t dare to take anything from that Medvedev, but they will simply duplicate the required amount to this Medvedev, and this will be called “structuring the financing program ...”
So everything is slowly returning to its own ice circles. Soviet hockey has always been favored by the highest authorities, and therefore was simply doomed to win: Leonid Ilyich personally attended ALL the central matches of the championship and never missed broadcasts from world championships and olympiads. And he was very amused by the anecdote of the sample of the 72nd year, when our first played a series with the NHL team. The Canadians lose after the first period 0:5, the president of the NHL bursts into the locker room to the professionals: “Are you idiots, do you want to stay without a job ?!” And after the second period, with the score already 5:5, the head of our delegation comes to his fans: “What, you scoundrels, did you want to work in any way ?!” And after all, ours won - 10:5 ...