The ex-chairman of the board of directors of the Ufa football club, former chairman of the Public Chamber of Bashkiria Rostislav Murzagulov, who in December 2022 was included in Russia on the list of foreign agents, spoke about a new scandal in Russian football.
Earlier this week, the governor of the Samara region, Vyacheslav Fedorishchev, issued a statement about corruption in Russian football related to refereeing. According to Fedorishchev, “it turned out that Krylia Sovetov owes 36 million to unnamed, apparently criminals who are involved in corruption in the refereeing corps of Russian football.” The governor of the Samara region also noted: there are about ten teams in the major league that are participating in this.
Murzagulov commented on this situation on his YouTube channel, saying the following about this:
“There was no corruption in the Ufa football club. We were the champion of Russia in economics, the champion of Russia in terms of our own income. We earned up to half the money ourselves every year. In Russia, the next club after us, in my opinion, was Krasnodar, where the owner was Galitsky, he himself earned 10-15%.
Russian football is a competition of budget thieves. Everyone has some kind of major sponsor – either it is a government agency, or it is a region, as is the case with “Wings of the Soviets”. They keep football teams with them because football is the number one sport, everyone is interested in competing with each other, people go. Competition of budget thieves. There, only FC Ufa earned money on its own, and the rest competed with each other in this parameter. And in order to place the places more or less the way they liked, those who had more money gave money to the judges in order to win.
In Ufa we took a player for 100-200 thousand euros somewhere on the outskirts of some third leagues, and they became our top scorers, like Sylvester Igbun. There were many other examples. We had a great team. It so happened from the very beginning that like-minded people gathered, everyone worked very well. Therefore, everyone had good salaries. As the president of FC Ufa in those years, I received 300,000 rubles, it was a decent salary, there was no need to invent anything. It was possible to live on this completely calmly. We followed this path, and not like some who set a salary of 1000 euros and received their kickbacks. We didn’t do this.
In Russian football, this system is like gangrene – with these kickbacks, fixed matches and referees who have nowhere to test. If you google “Murzagulov President of FC Ufa”, then every match I talk about facts about refereeing.
When the game is equal – for example, ours with the Tula Arsenal, in which the theft was simply insane… They bought some felt boots for fabulous money and at the same time, naturally, bought referees in order to give at least some result. When they played with us, for example, there were 21 fouls in our direction and 3 in their direction. Can you imagine this? So that with an outwardly equal game, in the absence of rudeness on both sides, this is the difference.
Those who worked with the judges were taller from time to time. We didn’t do this at Ufa. We have always had arguments with this RFU. They called me on the carpet to all these football functionaries: “Why are you muddying the waters here?”
