A master class by Eugene Giner

A master class by the president of PFK CSKA Eugene Giner was given at the RMA business school educational center to the students of «Sport Industry Management» program. During the class, the head of the army club discussed some of the issues, which, in his opinion, prevent the development of the national soccer at a higher rate.

«I constantly remind people: the main reason is because the majority of our clubs are not private, most of them are owned by the government, which in turn means that their sources of funding come either straight out of the national budget or by the so called forcefully-voluntary private investments, that are being squeezed out of businessmen by the regional governors, -- said Eugene Giner. -- And I'm not even even discussing the moral side of this situation, since that is obviously a violation of Fair Play, and UEFA will most likely very soon present an ultimatum: if you want to get your funding from these sources - God bless, but instead of playing in a European cups you'll be playing in your own backyard.

But the flip side of the coin is that it is also highly ineffective from purely athletic point of view.  Look, our national budget supported «Rubin» plays against «Betis» as part of the European League, which despite of being an outsider of the Spanish championship, is nevertheless a fair playing club. So what happens next, you probably are all aware of. Yet, who in our championship had achieved the most progress? That is «Krasnodar» and «Kuban», both of which are privately owned. The question is - why is there such a consistent correlation? And the answer is simple - only the private owner is truly interested in a high performance of his property, in arranging the effective distribution of duties, so that the managers that make the executive decisions know well the areas where they can benefit, and where they instead should optimize and save. So what kind of effectiveness your would expect from the clubs where the top-management is simply filling a temporary void, and are primarily concerned with an appropriation of the budget that falls on them figuratively from the sky? That's right - none!

And to add to this woe, we've got plenty more of others, such as bad infrastructure, old, uncomfortable and frankly unsafe stadiums, the limits placed on the acquisition of foreign players, which only exists in our country and nowhere else, by the way, this factor alone single handedly cripples the competition by placing those with the right papers into position of total complacency that dulls their skills and competitive senses.

And of course, among other reasons why our soccer is developing at such a sluggish rate, I would point out the inadequate performance of the sports oriented media. I'm talking about the situation where we no longer have the professional journalists who are capable of writing about the soccer in a way that would spark the genuine interest among the public and fans to the game itself and expand their knowledge and understanding of it. We are, in essence, completely lacking the quality soccer analytics. While they prefer to write about everything out there, from how much earns Smolov to whether or not Shirokov and Spaletti got into a real fight or they just cursed each other out - basically about anything but the real soccer. And I do recall the days of  magazines such as «Soviet Sport» and «Sport Express» when it was just launched by Kuchmiy… and I have to say - that was an entirely different level of journalism», -- pointed out Eugene Giner.