The invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s threat to European and world stability are also keeping the world of sport in check. And it could not be otherwise, considering the intertwining today more than ever inextricable between geopolitics, economics and Sport Industry. Football, basketball, volleyball, Formula 1, major events, all are in danger of being overwhelmed by the war storm unleashed by Moscow. International football institutions are called upon to make extremely delicate decisions.
Fifa and Uefa
Fifa has been called into question by the Ukrainian Football Association which has asked to ban Russia from any international competition and by Poland, which on March 24 should play the semifinal of the world playoffs in Moscow against Russia. The Warsaw Football Association asked Infantino to be allowed to play the match on a neutral pitch. They did the same for Sweden and the Czech Republic. One of the two may have to challenge the Russian national team in a possible final to win the pass for Qatar. More complicated is the position of Uefa which had scheduled the final of the Champions League 2022 in St. Petersburg at the Gazprom Arena on May 28th. Nyon in the extraordinary meeting convened on February 25 was thus embarrassed to change the venue of the match (moved to Paris at the Stade de France), displeasing one of its main sponsors, Gazprom, which pours into the coffers of the Confederation European Union a figure between 30 and 40 million a year for a decade to associate its brand in all Uefa competitions for clubs and national teams, with a contract valid up to Euro 2024. The headquarters of the Russian energy giant, controlled in fact by the State, it is right in a skyscraper of the former capital of the tsarist empire. At stake remains the Uefa Super Cup of 2023 for which the Ak Bars Arena in Kazan has been selected. UEFA also announced that Russian and Ukrainian clubs and national teams competing in international competitions must play their home games in neutral venues “until further notice”.
Gazprom
The real Achilles heel for President Alexander Ceferin is the contract with Gazprom. It must be said that since the beginning of the 2000s, Gazprom’s energy expansion policies have also scientifically leveraged football soft power. After becoming the owner of Zenit St. Petersburg, in fact, the group that holds the largest natural gas reserves in the world equal to a global share of 16%, he became the main sponsor of Schalke 04 and the Red Star (as well as having been for several years of Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea). The munificent partnership with the club of Gelsenkirchen, a crucial city in the European energy arena, began in view of the construction in 2011 of the Nord Stream 1, the more than 1,200 km long gas pipeline laid on the bottom of the Baltic Sea (completed in September 2021) to transport Russian gas directly to Western Europe, via Germany. The one with the Belgrade team was signed around 2010. A few years later, in a phase in which Gazprom always wanted to get a second gas pipeline to Serbia through the Black Sea, in order to bypass Ukraine. even the hypothesis that Gazprom bought the Red Star.
Schalke’s turnaround 04
On the eve of the Russian invasion, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin announced the suspension of the authorization for Nord Stream 2 (i.e. the additional project completed in September 2021 to double the annual gas transport capacity to 110 billion of cubic meters) of which Gazprom – annual turnover of 150 billion dollars – is still the majority shareholder. Schalke 04 has chosen to give a strong signal of solidarity to the Ukrainian people under attack, forcing the resignation from their supervisory board, where he has sat since 2019, the ceo of Nord Stream 2, Matthias Warnig (which has also ended up in the US blacklist) and above all by obscuring the Gazprom writing on their jerseys and in fact giving up the insured money until 2025 (nine million a year in the second division and 15 million a season plus three million bonuses in the event of a promotion). A choice the Western political world would like to replicate by UEFA.
Blacklisted club
Meanwhile, the US sanctions also directly affect the world of football. On the Washington blacklist ended the CSKA Moscow. Six-time winner of the Prem’er Liga, as well as the first Russian club to win a European competition after the dissolution of the USSR (the 2004 Uefa Cup), CSKA is controlled by the investment bank Vnesheconombank (VEB), which ended up in the crosshairs of the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (Ofac). The acquisition of the majority shares of CSKA Moscow by the VEB bank dates back to the end of 2019, when it took over them from the company Bluecastle Enterprises Ltd. For three years, the club had been playing home games in the new stadium, renamed VEB Arena in 2017 following the transfer of naming rights to the bank that had financed its construction. On 22 April 2020, the same VEB announced that it had concluded the acquisition of 77.63% of the shares of CSKA Moscow as part of the debt conversion into the club’s capital, remaining to this day as the main shareholder. An operation necessary “to resolve the issue of the club’s debt”, as declared at the time by the president of VEB, Igor Shuvalov. It must be said that the Russian sports system is predominantly based on the ownership of clubs (therefore also non-football clubs) by corporations linked to public bodies, parastatals and therefore under the control of politics. Apart from it Zenit St. Petersburg of Gazprom, loSpartak Moscow belongs to Lukoil, the country’s leading oil producer. Intertwines on which the world of sport, Fifa, Uefa and Cio cannot but question themselves today.