COME ON YOU REDS
After sealing the Chelsea deal, Abramovich was keen that President Putin should hear the news before he read it in the newspapers. And it wasn't long before Moscow's bush telegraph was at work. Putin's closest aide, Aleksandr Voloshin, couldn't resist a gossip. He made a late-night call to Alexei Venediktov. 'Can you imagine,' he said excitedly. 'Our man has bought Chelsea.' Voloshin's political antennae had been waving from the moment he first heard that so much Russian money had been spent on something as frivolous as a foreign football club. He asked Venediktov: 'How do you think people [here] will react?' It was a good question. Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, knew exactly how most of his countrymen would take the news and he wasted no time in making political capital out of it. He accused Abramovich of 'spitting on Russia' and he was soon joined in this condemnation by the former prime minister Sergei Stepashin.
Abramovich's confidant Venediktov remembers the reaction from those who called in to his radio programme:
It was as if Roman Abramovich had stolen the people's money and bought a toy for himself. People who phoned my radio programme all seemed to be saying that with one voice. So when I saw Roman a few days later I told him so. He said he had made a miscalculation, that he should have prepared the ground so that the public's reaction would have been more favourable. But he isn't really interested in public opinion in Russia - he doesn't care, he doesn't think it's in the least bit important.
On this occasion, however, Abramovich obviously came to the conclusion that a gesture was required. Russian football is only just beginning to recover from its post-Soviet hangover. In the late Nineties it was in a parlous state, as clubs that had been funded by state bodies found themselves penniless overnight. Attendances at games plummeted and the country's most talented players fled to foreign leagues. Even television wasn't interested in screening matches played by second-rate teams in shabby stadiums. In the circumstances, Abramovich decided that the best way to curry favour with embittered fans at home was to throw money at the problem. Canny as ever, he rushed out an announcement that he would be spending $65 million on a new stadium for the Moscow- based team FC CSKA, the former Red Army team that had won the Russian league in 2003. Due to the bitterness of the Russian winter, the season starts in the spring and ends in October. With plans for a glass roof and a capacity of 50,000, it promises to be the finest stadium in the country. Early the next year, he consolidated his position: Sibneft announced that it was to plough $18 million a year into the club for three years in return for exclusive rights to CSKA's image and merchandising. This $54 million contract was not only a huge deal by the standards of Russia's impoverished soccer sector but also by European standards. In fact it outstripped Manchester United's four-year sponsorship deal with the mobile phone giant, Vodafone. The richest club in the world, with a fan base larger than any other, will receive $65 million in all from this, equivalent to just over $16 million a year.
Sibneft presented its record-breaking agreement as a logical extension of its traditional commitment to sport in the regions where it operates, citing its $10 million a year expenditure on the ice hockey team Omsk Avangard and its $350,000 sponsorship of the international biathlon championships in Khanty-Mansiisk. Eugene Shvidler claimed that such activities were part of the company's 'social responsibility' and he looked forward to CSKA helping to increase Russian football's presence in the European arena. (CSKA's growing strength was illustrated by its victory over Glasgow Rangers in a preliminary round of the European Cup in August 2004, a win that led to them being drawn in Chelsea's group in the competition proper.)
But there was no disguising the fact that this was something of a face-saving operation. By the time Abramovich made his belated entry into the Russian football market, five of the sixteen teams in the Premier League were already being backed by big business - including Spartak Moscow (by Yukos) and Dinamo Moscow (by Lukoil). All this corporate involvement is transforming the fortunes of Russian football. Millions of dollars are being ploughed into remodelling stadiums and training grounds. Dinamo, for example, has plans to double its capacity to 60,000. Youth programmes are also being revived and foreign players are being lured to play in Russia for the first time in years. Exciting imports - by Russian standards, at least - such as the Czech international Jiri Jarosik, Winston Parks of Costa Rica (who scored a goal in the 2002 World Cup) and even a Brazilian, Jose de Souza, brought new life and energy to the game. Suddenly the television stations started taking a renewed interest and during the 2003 season no fewer than four networks showed both live matches and recorded highlights.
Today the average budget of a Russian Premiership side is $15 million, which values the league at more than $200 million. This puts it on a par with the equivalent leagues in The Netherlands, Sweden and Norway. Not that anyone is making any money. Like Sibneft, most of the companies involved view investment in football as one of their 'social programmes'. A Yukos spokesman once described its spending on Dinamo as of a 'charitable nature'. RusAl certainly appears to view football clubs in these terms: Oleg Deripaska, the company's director-general, acquired a share of Premier League side Kuban in January 2004; and German Tkachenko, vice president of one of RusAl's subsidiaries and the man who introduced Pini Zahavi to his friend Abramovich, is also chairman of Kyrilia Sovetov in Samara.
In addition to boosting the domestic league, Russia's oligarchs are determined to revive the fortunes of the national side. In the wake of Russia's dismal performance in the 2002 World Cup, Lukoil vice president and Yukos-Moskva president Vasili Shakhnovski wrote to the president of the Russian Football Union saying they were willing to foot the bill for hiring a foreign coach. The Russian team had failed to make the second round after losing to Japan and Belgium despite the fact that it was managed by Oleg Romantsev, who had enjoyed a successful career as a Russian Premier League manager and was universally accepted as the most talented coach in the country. If he couldn't succeed, ran the thinking, then nor would any other Russian coach. In the event, Romantsev was followed by another Russian, Valeri Gazzaev, but after a poor performance in the qualifying stages for the European Championships, he too was sacked.