Translated material
Embezzlement championship
A non -standard football championship starts in Russia
Nothing personal. The twentieth Russian football championship, which started on March 12, is more like a tournament of oligarchs and officials close to power, and not in football at all, but according to state funds. The New Times asked what millions of dollars will go to the clubs
“I am glad that Bashneft took a higher place than“ Lukoil ” - a phrase recently uttered by the President of CSKA Evgeny Giner, requires ignorant translation: the Army, sponsored by one oil company, was ahead of the Spartaks in the last championship sponsored by another. Giner had already performed in a similar tone six years ago: in 2005, Lukoil lost to another sponsor of the red-blue-Sibneft then Roman Abramovich. In these curtains in the direction of the “hand giving” - the essence of Russian football. You won’t earn a penny on it - and yet, after year, corporations are poured into it hundreds of millions of dollars. The current championship seems to become a peak of meaningless and merciless expenses.
Republican project
It is already obvious: to the traditional favorites of the championship, to be expressed by the Ginera terminology, in the person of Gazprom (Zenit), Bashneft (CSKA), Lukoila (Spartak), VTB (Dynamo), Russian Railways (Lokomotiv) and Tatenergo (Rubin) this year will be added this year - at least two more - at least two more - at least two more “Nafta-Moscow” and “ovapermantride”. We translate - the Makhachkala "Anji" and the Grozny "Terek".
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“The main trend of the next season is to show a stable and happy peaceful life in an unstable and far from a peaceful region,” said The New Times in the Russian Football Union in December 2010. “This is an order from the highest rooms, and they will not regret any money.” It turned out - true. In early February, Suleiman Kerimov acquired 70% of the shares of Anji, and at the end of the month the Dagestan club was replenished with the 2002 world champion as part of the Brazilian national team and the three-time winner of the Champions League in Real Madrid Roberto Carlos. From a sporting point of view (well, if you admit that Anji really wants to compete for medals), the course is completely pointless: Carlos, although it is a superstar of world football, is at sunset career, he is 37 years old, he runs around like a standing boy, and he does not hide what does it play. True, he planned to do this in the Brazilian Corinthians, but in a matter of days he changed his decision in favor of the team, the name of which he heard for the first time in his life. “Believe me, when moving to Russia, the money was not a decisive factor for me,” the Brazilian said political correctly after signing the contract, adding that “he loves black caviar.” It is impossible to catch Carlos on cunning: Russian clubs do not disclose their budgets - there is no such point in the regulations. But, according to information, Roberto will still receive € 4-5 million for various sources for staying at Anji.
A week after this, the megatransfer had another, in fact, much more curious, since the current player of the Brazil team came to Makhachkala, and came not to play, but to continue his promising career. 25-year-old Diego Tardelli became the best scorer of 2009 in his homeland, had proposals from England and Italy, but in a matter of days of Kerimov’s stay at the helm of Dagestan football, Anji chose. What contract was offered to him - Allah alone is known. The club says about? 7.5 million, but with difficulty believed in it. The total Anji budget this year, according to various sources, will amount to 600-700 million rubles. Probably, they could be given to sick children, let them go to fight terrorism or some other kind of heir, but the General Director of the Makhachkala residents, German Chistyakov, said: “Football should become a republican project of Dagestan!”
More than in Europe
Grozny "Terek" against the backdrop of "Anji" is a modest. In January, one of the most popular football players of the world, Dutchman Ruud Gullit, who trained a London Chelsea, after graduating from a playing career, arrived there. Of course, he also first stated that "he came not because of money, but because of the opportunity to realize his football ideas." True, the signing of the contract for a year and a half in a strange way coincided with the advent of the new sponsor (along with the already available Akhmat Kadyrov Foundation) is the structure of the Vovamerikantrade, the head of which is a great friend of the current president of Chry Bulat Chagaev. Her office is in Geneva, Gullit there and went to negotiations. The salary offered to the Dutchman remains a secret behind his seven seals, but the Terek’s new expenses can be judged from the testimony of a player who eventually did not go to Grozny for any rugs. We are talking about the 27-year-old striker of Scotland, Chrisa Boyde, who with 164 goals is the best scorer in the history of the championships of his native country. “In Russia, I was offered £ 1.3 million a year,” he admitted. “In Europe, no one would pay me that kind of money.”
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Ramzan Kadyrov on the football field dreams of the big victories of Terek (left), and Roman Abramovich knows the recipe for such victories without unnecessary running around
$ 40 million - about so much will be diverted in Grozny this year for football, which, sometimes, does not collect at the stadium named after Sultan Bilimkhanov and 5 thousand spectators.
Golden Arena
However, in comparison with the main favorite of the championship - Gazprom - all these Kerimovs, Kadyrov, Bashneft and Lukoils are just children. In the offseason, the vice-governor of St. Petersburg, Roman Filimonov, officially announced that the cost of building a new stadium in St. Petersburg called Gazprom-Arena increased by 8.4 billion rubles and will now amount to 33 billion (approximately $ 1.1 billion). “Clarified the estimate after recalculation” - as the state corporations explain a sharp increase in the budget. The stadium will become the second largest in the world, only the London Wembley ($ 1.5 billion) is more expensive. And at the cost of one spectator-and the most expensive, since the capacity of Wembley is 90 thousand spectators, and Gazprom-Arena-70. The Sport-Express newspaper considered: the average price of athletes on the planet Earth ranges from? 3 thousand to? 5 thousand in one place-depending on the class of the stadium. If you multiply 70 thousand spectators even by? 5 thousand, then 482.3 million will be transferred to dollars. It will not be clear that the gilded seats will not appear to the Gazprom-Arena construction.
The bottoms cannot
The tournament outsiders operate, of course, by other amounts. Three months before the start of the championship, Perm “Amkar” published a statement on the withdrawal from the tournament and actually death of the team (it has accumulated 160 million rubles), but by order “from above” came the savior - General Director of Mineral Fertilizer OJSC Gennady Shilov. A completely non -football man seems to be so stunned by what he saw that he blurted out in front of the television cameras: “The budget was spent incorrectly before me. The transfer took 95 million rubles, for which no one (!) Was bought. " Nevertheless, Amkar was not disbanded. Its new budget is 600 million rubles.
Similar were the scenarios of salvation of the Samara “Wings of the Soviets”, and Tomsk “Tomi”, and “Rostov”. Messages that “the Governor of the Rostov Region Vasily Golubev appointed his first deputy Viktor Goncharov by the president of the football club” (imagine for a second: David Cameron personally appoints the new CEO of Chelsea), or that “the Governor of the Tomsk Region Viktor Kors turned to the Russian government to find Tomi of the General Sponsor, in a civilized The world would look complete game. This is just football - what does the “Government of the Russian Federation” have to do with it? But the government also reacted the sponsors “found”, obliging the seven state -owned companies - Rosneft, Gazprom Neft, the Alliance, Sybur, Transneft, Inter RAO UES and IDSC Holding and Tomi Tomi, 315 million rubles. “If you take football from the regions, this threatens with social shocks,” the RFUs are sure.
Only the Ramensky “Saturn” did not escape, but there the limits of “ineffective management” (as football officials call banal theft) reached such sizes that it was easier to destroy the team. Before the new season, the debts of the club near Moscow, the main shareholder of which is the government of the Moscow Region, amounted to 803.7 million rubles. “Saturn” tried to redeem with all the debts the Lithuanian oligarch Vladimir Romanov, but he was refused, as they say on the sidelines, because of the fear that the alien person would start with audit checks and find something completely indecent. From the famous one: the contract of midfielder Andrei Karyaki, who scored only two goals in 2010, amounted to 69.78 million rubles a year.
We were convinced for a long time that football is a number one game. And we fools did not believe.