The column is led by Dmitry Polonsky

Photo: Sergey Rasulov/NewsTeam, Kommersant

The Anzhi football club urgently put up most of its stars for sale. Having spent about €0.5 billion on a sports project over two and a half years, its owner Suleiman Kerimov will be forced to try to return at least part of the funds in three weeks.

ROMAN OVCHINNIKOV

For two years in a row, the most wasteful club in Russia shocked the sports community with its readiness to shell out any money for an elderly star from the bench. As a result, such a lineup was assembled that just a few weeks ago it seemed to be a contender for the championship. The fairy tale ended overnight. The participants in the events themselves, however, are confused in their testimony. According to one version, in the middle of last week the co-owner of Uralkali suddenly experienced a “sharp deterioration in health amid worries about the club’s failures”: the “team of millionaires” lost at home to the modest “Rostov”. Let us note that health problems arose simultaneously with the fall in price of Uralkali by $5.5 billion. Then Kerimov’s representatives began to assure that the billionaire had no health problems, but the fact was that Anzhi’s development strategy had changed. Now the Dagestan club must lose the “super” prefix and become a mid-budget club, naturally by Russian standards—about $50 million a year—and rely on its own players. It is worth noting that Anzhi is formally Dagestani: the club is based in Moscow, and flies a couple of hours to Makhachkala for home games. Now, it looks like he will move to his home region for permanent residence. Dagestani Gadzhi Gadzhiev has already been appointed as coach. The visionary Dutchman Guus Hiddink, who coached the club before, unexpectedly terminated his contract at the end of July. Moreover, he did this just a month and a half after he signed a new deal with Anzhi. Now it’s clear why. The club says there was no tragedy. “The project will be reformatted. Anzhi remains. Already with a new philosophy, infrastructure, which has never existed in the club,” says German Tkachenko, a member of the club’s board of directors.

Before relying on your own students, you need to sell those of others. And then Anji found itself in a stalemate. Kerimov gathered very expensive and highly paid employees in his club. For comparison: 32-year-old Cameroonian Samuel Eto'o (pictured) earns €21 million a year at Anzhi, and the best football player in the world, Lionel Messi, recently knocked out a new increased salary of €12 million from Barcelona. Eto'o, According to representatives of the club, they have no plans to sell. The club's management has only three weeks to find a new job for the rest: the transfer window closes on September 2. It is impossible to do this without a discount, but it is also more expensive to keep the players until the winter, until the new window. A number of Premier League clubs have already expressed a desire to buy or return sold players, but at a cheaper price. Thus, the Ivorian Draman Traore was taken from Kuban for €18 million, Zenit is now offering €9 million for him.

Of course, the drop in Uralkali's capitalization played a role in the collapse of the project. But it seems that Kerimov simply chose the right moment to stop the financial madness of German Tkachenko, who is responsible for transfers. Thanks to management, the billionaire spent astronomical sums with no chance of returning them: about €250 million on transfers alone. In total, about €0.5 billion was invested in Anzhi. The prices that Anji pays for housing for players: for its main star Samuel Eto'o, the club rented an apartment in Moscow for €80 thousand per month, for Christopher Samba - an economy option for €25 thousand per month.

The question arises as to how the “reformatting” of the richest club will affect the entire market: after all, Russian football is very dependent on near-state structures and monopolies. There will definitely not be a series of announcements of similar bankruptcies. No one has yet tried to repeat Kerimov’s experience and it is unlikely that they will. For a regional social project, Anzhi turned out to be too expensive, like a federal one - it simply irritated the fans.

How a super club became simply "Anji"