The Downfall of a Russian Soccer Team – The New Yorker

The Russian soccer team Dynamo Moscow has its roots in a factory club that was founded in 1887, at the Morozov mill, on the city’s outskirts. In the spring of 1923, the club was co-opted by Vladimir Lenin’s feared secret police, the Cheka, and given its current name. (The playwright Maxim Gorky is credited with coining the club motto, “Vlast v Dvizhenii,” or “Power in Motion.”) By the mid-thirties, Moscow was home to five major teams, four of which represented different arms of the Soviet state: CDKA, now CSKA, was the team of the Red Army; Dynamo, the secret police; Lokomotiv, the state railways; and Torpedo was the club of the city’s sprawling Torpedo-ZiL automobile factory. The exception was Spartak Moscow, founded by the Young Communist League and the local soccer hero Nikolai Starostin, who named his club after the gladiator who revolted against Roman rule. Spartak forged an identity as “the people’s club,” which is why, even today, it has more fans at its games than any of its rivals can boast.

Dynamo, led by Lavrenti Beria, a vicious sexual predator and head of the N.K.V.D.—the police force that succeeded the Cheka, and was succeeded in turn by the K.G.B.—won the first Soviet championship, in 1936. A bitter rivalry between Beria’s Dynamo and Spartak—support for whom represented a small act of everyday protest against the politburo—ensued. The enmity reached its peak in 1939, when Beria ordered a cup semifinal that Spartak had won to be replayed, one month later. Spartak won the replay, 1–0, and went on to win that year’s trophy. In 1942, Beria wreaked his revenge, sending Starostin to the gulag for ten years for “praising bourgeois sports.” (Upon Stalin’s death, Beria was arrested by Nikita Khrushchev, and, in 1953, at the age of fifty-four, he was executed.) Dynamo dominated in the nineteen-forties, but it has not won the domestic league since 1976.

In October, I visited Khimki, a suburb of Moscow, to watch the latest installment of Dynamo versus Spartak, known as Russia’s oldest derby. The prestige of the contest has dimmed as Dynamo has been eclipsed by crosstown rivals CSKA and by Zenit St. Petersburg, a team founded in 1925 and bought, in 2005, by the state-owned gas company, Gazprom. Zenit is now littered with stars and competing well at Europe’s top table, the Champions League. Meanwhile, both Dynamo and CSKA are playing their matches at Arena Khimki, an eighteen-thousand-six-hundred-and-thirty-six-seat stadium built to house a club from the surrounding suburb, and awaiting new arenas of their own. As I watched Spartak come back from a 2–1 deficit to win, 3–2, on what was practically the final kick of the match, a local writer turned to me. “It’s the curse,” he said, referencing Beria, for whose sins Dynamo, many say, has yet to atone. But the club’s predicament owes more to the topsy-turviness of Russian soccer than to some historic hoodoo.

Russian soccer has rarely been run in parallel with its European neighbors. The Russian Premier League took shape during the Soviet era, and it is studded with clubs run not as businesses but as the playthings of oligarchs, despots, and, chiefly, the Russian state. However, a landmark ruling last year by the sport’s European governing body, UEFA, may, eventually, change that. Under the organization’s Financial Fair Play (F.F.P.) rules, Dynamo, which is funded by a state bank and by Boris Rotenberg, Russia’s hundredth-wealthiest person and Vladimir Putin’s former judo partner, was found to have grossly manipulated its finances and, consequently, was expelled from European competition.

Now its biggest international stars have left for teams in other countries, and the once-powerful side is languishing at the bottom end of the Premier League table. What’s more, people have begun to speculate that the fall of Dynamo could precipitate trouble for the country’s other major teams. For Russia, the timing of the case could hardly be more awkward: in just a few years, it will host the World Cup, and the Kremlin is keen to project global power and prestige. With Dynamo shamed, and more teams potentially to follow, the standing of Russian soccer could be in tatters before a single ball of the tournament is kicked.

Attendance at Dynamo matches has fallen since the Soviet era: people no longer relish the team’s association with the state police. Today, the club rarely breaks five figures for home matches; last season its average turnout was a little more than seven thousand. And, like all Russian teams, its revenue from TV deals is fairly minuscule: the country’s Premier League receives just thirty-six million dollars per year for broadcast rights. (The English Premier League signed a three-year TV deal last year for $7.8 billon.) This means that, to compete with Europe’s big players, Russia’s clubs need giant benefactors. And in modern Russia that can only mean the state.

Since 2009, Dynamo has received the vast majority of its funding from V.T.B., a state bank that owns three-quarters of the club. The rest has been in the hands of a sporting committee, composed, as it was under Lenin, of police, army, and members of the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or Federal Security Service. From 2013 until last year, the club’s president was Boris Rotenberg. In the V.T.B. era, Dynamo has spent big. In came stars like the German striker Kevin Kurányi, the Congo defender Christopher Samba, and, in August, 2014, the French midfielder Mathieu Valbuena, from Marseille. An ambitious new stadium was planned, a twenty-seven-thousand-capacity arena abutted by a variety of residential and commercial buildings. This real estate, Vladimir Ageev, a lecturer at Moscow State University’s Sports Management Center, told me, was the bank’s primary intention. “That stadium is near the Moscow center on a big territory, and it costs a lot of money. And now they are building not only the stadium but also a lot of offices. For V.T.B. there was no interest in sport; it was only interested in giving money, then taking the stadium.”

“Financial Fair Play changed a lot,” Kurányi told me. This past summer, Rotenberg, the team president, left, too, as did the sporting director, Guram Adzhoyev, and twelve more players. V.T.B. has proposed to end its association with the club, handing control back to the sporting committee, as in “the good old days,” the Russian soccer writer Toke Theilade joked to me recently. V.T.B. will still own the new stadium. Dynamo’s response has been to play a variety of young, local players, and to emphasize its history: the team released a documentary that lauds the war-hero players from its early days and a 1945 team that beat a host of British clubs on a four-match goodwill tour that followed the Second World War. The club’s current trophy-winning dreams, though, are over: ahead of the Russian Premier League’s resumption following its winter break, Dynamo sits eleventh of sixteen clubs, just four points from relegation. And, looking elsewhere in the table, it’s probably just the beginning of a wave of new troubles for Russian soccer.

Russian sports leaders were delighted when their nation was chosen, in December, 2010, to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Since then, though, they have been on the back foot. Violence and racism have dogged the Russian Premier League, and Dynamo’s troubles suggest that the way Russian soccer is currently run simply can’t work in a European system. “It’s difficult to say,” Theilade told me, when I asked if that was the case. “I think UEFA are going to make the Financial Fair Play regulations a bit lighter. . . . Nevertheless, it’s very obvious that Russian football still has some very big problems, of how it’s built up around the owners and the sponsors.”

Corruption is everywhere, and it comes in many different guises. Some teams share financial interests, and accusations of match-throwing abound. In Italy, an extensive scam, dubbed “Calciopoli,” came to light in 2006, but, in that country, there was a motivation to root out the culprits, according to Vasily Afanasiev, a sports-management lecturer at Moscow State University. In Russia, on the other hand, “we haven’t any political will to see this problem,” he explained. The financial crisis hasn’t helped. And then there are the gate receipts. “It’s the Russian tradition to show something good,” Afanasiev told me. “For example, the owners of the clubs can buy all the tickets and say the stadium’s full. . . . It’s one thousand fans in the stadium, but the stadium has ten thousand seats. And the owner buys eight thousand seats,” hoping to then bring in revenue from investors and sponsors. Something like this appeared to have occurred at a league match I attended, later that week, between Lokomotiv Moscow and F.C. Rostov. The announcer declared the attendance to be above six thousand, but when Rostov scored a second goal, to go up 2–0, individual howls of joy and derision could easily be heard rattling around the twenty-eight-thousand-eight-hundred-capacity stadium, as if they were the cheers of parents at a school match. (I would put a generous estimate of the crowd at around four thousand.)

Lokomotiv will likely be the next team under F.F.P. scrutiny. The club has four official sponsors, but each is a subsidiary of the state railway company, R.Z.D. V.T.B. also holds a nine per cent stake in the club. “They are trying their best now to avoid punishment next summer, so UEFA should appreciate that,” a Lokomotiv fan told me with a hint of desperation. “If Russian clubs don’t use state money, they will be compatible” with the rules, he explained. But, without that source of funding, their international competitiveness and eminence “will drop down significantly.” That, he told me, is not an option the sport’s powerbrokers want to consider, ahead of the World Cup.

According to Ageev, there is only one way to bring Russian soccer into line with the modern game: get the government out of it. But the state believes it is the solution to, rather than the cause of, the game’s current bind. In December, the country’s sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, placed a ban on state monopolies buying foreign players, which followed a drop in the number of non-Russian players allowed on each side from seven to six. And a recent move banning clubs from buying Turkish players, in the wake of Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet flying missions in Syria, suggests that the Kremlin is happy to preside over its domestic game with a heavy hand.

With the V.T.B. arena set for completion this year, Dynamo can finally come home from Khimki; that will surely bring back thousands of fans. Add that to the publicity that Russia’s hosting of the world’s largest sporting event will surely bring, and, armed with a new generation of local youngsters, perhaps the club will compete at the highest level once more. But the challenges are severe. Aleksandr Kokorin, a twenty-four-year-old striker who has been one of the few bright marks in the team’s current season, has moved to Zenit, having reportedly rejected a $2.7 million yearly salary offer from Dynamo. Yuri Zhirkov, a Premier League veteran with sixty-seven appearances for Russia, has already left for the St. Petersburg club. Kurányi, the German striker, remembers better days, when Dynamo Moscow was in the Europa League and won six games in a row. It was one of the best times of his career, he said. “I wish that Dynamo gets back to this level again.”