Whether the president and head coach in the golden Lokomotiv will get along in the next season

At the end of May, the Council of Directors of the Lokomotiv football club will summarize the results of the season. It would seem that the first championship in 14 years is the case when you can drink champagne and knock out bonuses for the next season. But in fact, the brilliance of gold medals only retouchs the problems that the club will encounter next season, and he, if transferred to the transfer of transfer work, begins just in May.

The main event in the history of Lokomotiv in recent years did not occur in the club, but in its main sponsor - Russian Railways. Two years ago, the State Monopoly was headed by the former deputy minister of transport Oleg Belozerov, who began to carefully clean the company and its subsidiaries from the heritage of Vladimir Yakunin. Starting with a rotation in the key structural units of the maternal company, Belozerov completed it with personnel permutations in a non -core asset, the Lokomotiv football club.

Until the last moment, the new bosses did not understand who Olga Smorodskaya should replace the club’s president, who set up the majority of the club’s fans against herself and at the same time did not provide serious sports results.

Then, in early May 2016, the surname of the former financial director of the St. Petersburg Zenit and the ex-head of the League-TV, Ilya Hercus, got into the high rooms of the Russian Railway. The young intelligent manager has never been on the forefront in big football, but managed to earn a reputation as a person of an extremely hardworking and infinitely devoted to billionaire Boris Rotenberg, at the request of which he helped his son in the development of Sport-Concept (the main supplier of sports equipment of the Russian Hockey Federation and the Continental Hockey League).

According to the acquaintances of the billionaire, Rotenberg Gerus attracted the attention of the Successful organization of the Sochi Grand Prix Formula 1.

The task before the new leader was simply formulated - to achieve worthy sporting results, as far as possible to develop a football academy, and most importantly - to return to the stadium in Cherkizov in the last decade of fans of the team.

There were also problems that were not visible to an external observer. Part of the talented youth and the coaching staff worked with agents, whose loyalty will not have to be counted. To establish a dialogue with them, as well as to equip the team for the new sports season, Igor Korneev, invited by Ilya Hercus to the post of sports director thanks to joint work in St. Petersburg.

First of all, however, I had to look for a coach: from the acting The "driver" of Oleg Pashinin diagnosed heart problems.

Herus, openly sympathizing with the European coaching school, planned to find a mentor in the German Bundesliga for the team. However, he was forced to fulfill informal obligations to the former employer Rotenberg, who, before appointing to Lokomotiv, promised to support the candidacy of his close friend Kurban Berdyev.

Even Russian billionaires sometimes become victims of their naivety - lobbying for their protege to third -party structures, they only after a while understand that after receiving a high status they cling to the first opportunity to break old ties.

So it happened with Ilya Hercus. Having held duty negotiations with Kurban Berdyev, the newly -made President of Lokomotiv prepared a small list of candidates for the head of the head coach, accompanying him with trivial characteristics.

In addition to Berdyev, the Italian coach Cesare Prandelli, who is unlikely to guess this to this day, as well as the legend of Lokomotiv, Yuri Semin, to whom Herus gave the best characteristics.

Apparently, he considered Semina as an ideal counterweight to Kurban Berdyev and hoped to avoid interference in the club affairs of the former patron of Rotenberg. Well, it is obvious that it was a wide gesture towards all the fans and a significant part of the sponsors who wanted to see Semin’s favorite team at the helm.

Following the favorite principle of the Win-Win negotiation strategy, Gerkus proposed the candidacy of Yuri Semin to the Club Directors, which was the most influence on the representatives of Transmashholding, led by billionaire Andrei Bokarev and his assistant Anatoly Meshcheryakov. Semin's candidacy was approved by the club management and found support in the Council of Directors of the Russian Railways, including the group of old railway workers and Sergey Stepashin.

The return of the legend was officially announced in August, under the curtain of the summer transfer window.

The contract with Semin was signed for a year, with automatic extension for the same period in the event of a command in the European Cup.

Transfers

Shortly before the transfer of the transfer window, the Lokomotiv composition was replenished by Dynamo Igor Denisov and Boris Rotenberg. The deal became "package." The transition of Denisov was only an integral (but not inextricable) part of the transition of Rotenberg Jr. And this transfer was supposed to strengthen not so much the team as the position of Hercus himself, which previously ugly parted with an influential family. In order to soften this situation, it was logical to invite the son of a billionaire, who refused to work in the companies of his father or career in state corporations for the sake of a children's dream to become a Russian football champion. (Dynamo, which then flew out of the elite division, was impossible.) But even this logical step Herus did not take it himself, but under the pressure of St. Petersburg businessmen, to which the Director General of Loko turned for advice and protection.

Just at that time, the team broke out the first big conflict: agents of the brothers Alexei and Anton Miranchuk, two main stars of the team, demanded that the club increase the salary for their customers. The brothers expired in November 2017, and for their extension, agents requested a round sum, promising, otherwise to achieve competitors to the camp. The greatest interest in the services of the players was shown by Rubin, Zenit and Krasnodar.

The story with the signing of contacts with Miranchuks will drag on for six months, for which the club and agents will express a lot of unpleasant through the press about each other, and will be resolved again thanks to the intervention of people from the outside and the help of members of the board of directors.

In December, the club announced the dismissal of the sports director of Lokomotiv Igor Korneev-he was replaced by Eric Shtoffelhaus, who once worked at the Schalke sports directorate, but headed the children's football academy in Canadian Ontario in recent years.

The figure of a new functionary, which is also called Alter Ego Ilya Hercus in the club, will become a stumbling block in the relationship between the leadership of the club and the coaching staff. In March 2017, on the recommendation of a German specialist, the Club concluded a contract with the Peruvian striker Jefferson Farfan, about which the head coach Yuri Semin was informed right during the team’s gathering in the Spanish Marbella.

And a month later, Ilya Gerus held negotiations with the coaches of Skrypnik and Vogel, without informing the board of directors and the leadership of Russian Railways.

Information about the search for a new mentor bypassing the Board of Directors then nevertheless climbed into the press, but the emerging conflict was repaid thanks to the victory of Lokomotiv in the Russian Cup.

On the occasion of the Triumph, which ensured the participation of the team in the new drawing of the Europa League, the final meeting of the board of directors was visited by the head of Russian Railways Oleg Belozerov. Members of the Council were already preparing to hear the reports of Ilya Hercus and Yuri Semin and extend the powers of the latter for another year, as the club general manager announced the need to change the head coach.

They did not listen to Ilya Hercus Belozers and Semin did not ...

Conflict

In the summer of 2017, the decision of the Club Board of Yuri Semin was extended for another year, but the relations between the coach and the president deteriorated: Ilya Gerus actually stopped participating in the life of the team, never appeared on the team of the team in Bakovka.

Semin, in turn, complained to the leadership of Russian Railways about the low quality of transfer work performed by the club.

So, for example, in August, Semin failed to get to his team the striker of St. Petersburg Zenit Artem Dziubu, whom he planned to replace the emerging from the Brazilian Ari. The coach was indignant why Hercus was not able to rent a Russian striker if the Petersburg club himself came out with such an offer? True, the newcomer for the team was found by sports director Eric Shtoffelhaus, who brought the Portuguese Eder to Moscow.

The president of the club also took a passive position in the issue of redeeming the transfer of the Rubin defender Solomon Querkvelia, who brilliantly played half the season in Lokomotiv. A contract with a football player was concluded only after a personal visit to Kazan, a member of the Board of Directors of the Club Andrei Bokarev.

This spring, Ilya Herus entered the confrontation with Bokarev himself, who convicted the club president in organizing leaks in the press about the club’s internal life. He especially did not like how Gerus searches in the club “Natives of the Izmailovskaya organized crime group”. Then Bokarev saw unpleasant hints in his address.

The catalyst for the conflict with Semin was the meeting of Ilya Hercus with the Italian coach Carlo Ancheelotti, who was invited to accept the team at the end of the current season. The season in which Lokomotiv held first place in the championship and moved along the tournament grid in the Europa League.

Gersus would probably have made an offer to change the coach at a meeting of the coming Council, if two days before the Golden Match with Zenit, the head of Russian Railways did not insist the contract with Yuri Semin.

The next season, Herus will hardly abandon the idea of ​​dismissing the head coach, if only because he is sure that his contribution to the club’s successes is more and with the composition that he collected, anyone can win in the championship. Semin probably could say the same thing from my bell tower: if I won the championship even with such a general director, then without it I can succeed and even more so. This conflict cannot end differently than the dismissal from the club at least one of its defendants. The only question is whether this will happen during the next season, or on May 28.