The Gazprom-Daddied Rise and War-Sanctioned Fall of PFC Sochi

The club was formed to fill a void from the Olympics and World Cup, they qualified for Europe within three years, and now have just been relegated back to where they started.

On the coast of the Black Sea, half an hour drive from the resort city of Sochi, sits a £626-million white elephant. Fisht Stadium began construction in 2010, three years after Sochi was selected as the host city for the 2014 Winter Olympics. The stadium hosted the glistening spectacle of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, but saw no actual sporting events take place there. From then, it underwent a renovation, costing a further £26-million, to become fit to stage football matches as a host city of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Both events came and went and left behind them the issue of what to do with the 45,994 capacity stadium. But a solution had been devised behind the scenes, ready to swoop in, save face, and put the Russian taxpayer’s money to good use: Give it to a football club. And if there is no football club in Sochi, make one.

At the time no professional football club existed in Sochi, though not for lack of trying — three clubs had formed in Sochi since the millennium and yet none remained active by 2018. Sochi had just never been a football city. With the backdrop of the mountains behind it pulling people to the region for skiing, and the beaches below drawing summer tourists, an increasing proportion of real estate is expensive luxury holiday housing, and few residents stick around for the football season. There was, however, a man with a desire to change that. Boris Rotenberg is what many would describe as an oligarch, he is a Russian businessman with large investments in many industries, who has been a friend of Vladimir Putin ever since the Rotenberg brothers were his martial arts instructors in the Soviet army. Boris and his brother Arkady Rotenberg had also been closely intertwined with the 2014 Winter Olympics, helming companies awarded sporting infrastructure contracts worth £5.94-billion from Putin’s government. Subsequently, in the wake of the 2014 Crimean crisis, the Rotenbergs were the subject of economic sanctions by the United States, who cited their affiliation with the Russian government as the reason. Eight years later, Boris Rotenberg would have his United Kingdom assets frozen and be barred from entering the UK when Putin launched the war in Ukraine. Boris Rotenberg had also been long involved in the business of football, he went through an infamous spell as president of Dynamo Moscow from 2013 to 2015, during which time the club was suspended from European competition for financial fair play violations. In 2015, however, he completed the purchase of FC Dynamo-Saint Petersburg (no affiliation to Dynamo Moscow), a small club in the third tier of Russian football, who, by 2018, thanks to his investment, had been promoted to the second tier, the Russian First League.

The government had the stadium and the hope of avoiding the embarrassment of wasting it. Boris Rotenberg had a team and the money from all the government contracts to finance it. It was a match made in heaven. Dynamo-Saint Petersburg did have their fans, but the city’s footballing attention had always been focused on their heavyweight neighbours Zenit and it was the opinion of Rotenberg and the league that the minnow of Saint Petersburg would not be missed. The Dynamo supporters group did what they could to protest their unhappiness with the move, but the process occurred so quickly in the public eye. The first rumblings of this plan were surfacing in the spring, and then almost as soon as the season ended, the club was dissolved, half of the existing players and staff signed new contracts with the freshly formed PFC Sochi, and they were already playing pre-season friendlies during the tail end of the World Cup, before their stadium was even available. This was not so much a relocation of an existing club, but a club forcibly being eradicated to free up a slot in the Russian First League and serve the needs of the government and the old club’s obliging owner.

PFC Sochi was thus born on July 4th 2018 and they wasted no time in achieving their goals. With a squad half-consisting of former Dynamo players and filled out with free transfers, PFC Sochi got promoted from the Russian First League at the first time of asking, finishing 2nd in their debut season. And wouldn’t you know it, Russian giants, Zenit St. Petersburg were on hand to sell and loan nine players to PFC Sochi once their promotion from the Russian First League to the Russian Premier League was confirmed, raising the eyebrows of Russian football fans and prompting remarks that Zenit had just gained a brand new feeder club. And this was not without justification. Zenit, after all, are owned by oil company Gazprom. Gazprom, in turn, is majority owned by the Russian state. You can see how the dots were being joined in the head of the football-conscious citizen. Boris Rotenberg’s infrastructure contracts with Gazprom, and his position as a shareholder in Gazprom’s drilling subsidiary, further illuminated the reasons behind Sochi’s rise. Despite these links, neither Gazprom nor Zenit legally have any affiliation with PFC Sochi, any external investments coming in to the club have been from obfuscated sources. Russian football regulations, after all, state that the same investor does not have the right to finance teams playing in the same league, which is a problem for Gazprom when, while they publicly own Zenit, there is also evidence that they have been indirectly financing Nizhny Novgorod (another club playing at a newly-built World Cup venue).

Despite the mystery behind their investment, PFC Sochi burst into the Russian Premier League, spending £11.9 million on players in their first season, more than the eight other bottom clubs combined, £11.4 million of that was spent on Zenit players, and safely finished 12th in their first season in the 16-team top flight as a result. It was largely going as planned for those with interests in the success of Sochi, but the 2019–20 season was not without controversy for the club. When the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading, the Russian league persevered with their matches for longer than many leagues and this resulted in Sochi setting a bizarre record for most goals in a game when they beat Rostov 10–1 in June. The entire Rostov first team squad and reserves had been quarantined with COVID-19 and Sochi insisted that neither postponing the fixture, nor playing their own youth players against Rostov’s, were options. Unfortunately, several Sochi players then did contract COVID themselves and PFC Sochi were forced to forfeit their final two games of the season.

For 2020–21, Russian football had moved behind closed doors, possibly conferring an advantage to Sochi as they already had experience playing in a large mostly-empty stadium, with an average of only 10,785 fans trekking the 33km from central Sochi to Fisht Stadium the previous season. They continued their high spending and their success and in 2020–21 they finished in 5th place, qualifying for the inaugural season of the Europa Conference League, in less than three years since Dynamo-Saint Petersburg shut down and PFC Sochi sprung into existence. Their arrival in European competition brought the attention of the football world outside of Russia upon PFC Sochi for the first time. Articles sprung up on their rapid rise and the question of whether they would establish themselves at the top of Russian football alongside Zenit for the foreseeable future. Sochi failed to qualify for the group stages however, losing on penalties to Partizan Belgrade. This short term disappointment did nothing to dent their ambition and they had an incredibly successful start to the 2021–22 season. For the first time, PFC Sochi players were getting called up to national team, and, at the time of the standard Russian winter break, the club sat in 3rd place in the RPL, with 31 points from 18 games. Questions were being asked about their potential to qualify for the Champions League, the top table of European football. However, on the 22nd February 2022, the week the league was set to resume, Russian forces invaded Ukraine and started a war that is still ongoing. This completely changed the landscape of Russian football overnight. FIFA granted foreign players the right to unilaterally cancel their contracts at Russian clubs, calls were made by clubs to open the domestic transfer window immediately, remove the cap on foreign players, impose a moratorium on relegation, or even expand the league to 18 teams. The most crucial transformation for PFC Sochi though: Russian teams were indefinitely excluded from European competition. They finished 2nd to Zenit that season, by nine points, not enough to threaten the title seriously, but it marked the apex of a rapid ascendancy for the club. The win and draw they sealed across two fixtures against Zenit were enough to force the players to bat off accusations that they perhaps weren’t having as hard a battle against Zenit as other clubs were, and the finishing position would be enough, in any other season, to qualify for the Champions League.

Champions League money completely revolutionises any club. Even for a financially-doped club, one season of revenue for making the group stage can set a club on its path to becoming sustainable and obviate the need for outside investment. This was especially relevant for Sochi because cracks were beginning to show in the fairytale. Rotenberg had been sanctioned by the UK, US, and the EU before the season was finished, and though he claimed “(the) sanctions will not affect Sochi and my support for the club”, it was an unwelcome problem when financial issues had already begun to rear their head. It had been revealed in early 2021 by Agency, a Russian investigative online publication, that PFC Sochi had received £16 million from Energoprom (a company associated with Gazprom), which, while revealing a source of investment behind their on-the-field success, did not bode well for the future, because, the situation was, in Agency’s words, “a dying company with a nominal owner, shortly before liquidation, transfer almost 2 billion rubles to a football club from Sochi and closes down, without even expecting to return this money”. The investigators went on to suggest that, as well as the Russian football regulations hampering Gazprom’s direct investment, there is a hesitance from companies to openly collaborate with PFC Sochi and Rotenberg, lest they be subject to the same increasing sanctions that Rotenberg has been under since 2014. Despite the obfuscated investment that had been coming in, at the end of 2020, a loss of £3.4 million had been recorded in PFC Sochi’s accounts, in 2021, a loss of £1.5 million. By the time the 2022–23 season came around, with no Champions League money to make up the shortfall, Sochi had to start selling. Though they still spent £3.1 million on players, they sold four players for a total sum of £7.7 million, with £6.8 million of that coming from Zenit St. Petersburg, a reverse of the trend set in previous years. Their ticket sales were doing little to help as well, there was no fan attendance at all in Russia in 2020–21 and 2021–22, and in 2022–23 they returned with an average attendance, in that behemoth of a stadium, of only 3353 fans, that venue of such spectacle in 2014 and 2018 was essentially a ghost town when Sochi weren’t playing one of Russia’s biggest teams. The 2022–23 season went by with much less fanfare and a crash back down to earth as the club meandered to a 10th-place finish, in front of a total of fans that filled out less than 10% of Fisht Stadium, and continued to sell players, with Zenit reaching into their pockets to spend on Sochi’s two biggest departures the next summer.

This season, the reaper has come for PFC Sochi. They started off with 11 losses in their opening 13 games of the season and were battling for their survival from the start. In these last two seasons, they have churned through five permanent managers already, compared to just two in the previous four seasons and no matter who was in charge, the situation only worsened in the league. There have been continuing appeals, with Sochi now adding their voice to the crowd, calling for the expansion of the league to 18 teams, a last gasp that may yet save them but seems increasingly unlikely as the season end comes near, mirroring their hopes of footballing salvation. PFC Sochi does not look like a club that expects to be around for a while. The last whimpers of its presence as an elite club have been perplexing, their previously active X (Twitter) account abruptly stopped posting in January, followed by their Facebook account, a month later, curiously. The ‘History of the Club’ section on their website was abandoned far earlier in the descent, sometime in their successful 2021–22 season. With one of the last notable events being the collection of messages from Xavi, David Villa, and Sergio Aguero wishing the famous club a happy third birthday.

It’s undeniable that the problems facing the powerful men of Russia have shifted over the course of the last six years since PFC Sochi was founded. At the time when the plan was drawn up, the Olympics and the World Cup were two of the biggest things on the agenda, and the mind of the Russian population would have undoubtedly had some thoughts on the legacy of the projects. Soft power has always been a key pillar of government, we saw the attacks on the Brazilian government in 2014 for spending so lavishly on the World Cup there when there was so much poverty just a few streets away in the favelas. An empty £626 million stadium to justify similar claims that the Russian government is more obsessed with looking good, and lining the pockets of the developers, than helping the Russian people is an unappealing prospect. But six years is a long time, and the soft power approach has hardened considerably. A pandemic, a war, sanctions, an attempted coup, and another sham election have happened in the intervening years and the Olympics feel a distant memory now, as do the remnants that it left behind. Vladimir Putin’s grip on power has altered — the international, inviting-the-world-to-Russia style is a thing of the past. It’s possible that Putin’s government can now trust that it has been long enough, and enough has happened since, that filling Fisht Stadium is no longer a priority and it can just be left to rust in the suburbs.

Boris Rotenberg has been publicly commenting less frequently as the end approaches, only breaking a month-long silence at the end of April to confirm that they did not blame FC Akhmat Grozny after 14 Sochi players were laid low for the fixture between the two with what is translated from Russian press reports merely as “poisoning” (unexcitingly, I’ve gleaned from context that they mean food poisoning). Losing 14 players in a relegation battle was an issue that PFC Sochi could do without. After all, the buck stops, ultimately, with the results, and as the games ticked by, the opportunities to reverse their fortunes with good performances were dwindling. The loss against Akhmat was their first loss (after six draws and a win) since the winter break. It is unknown what fate would have befallen Sochi had they survived this season. Even with the worrying signs, omens like the signing of former Monaco and Spain manager Robert Moreno suggests that things may not be as bad as they seem, and maybe their on-pitch problems this season could have been rectified once the financial ship was steadied. But on-pitch and off-pitch problems quickly compound when a relegation comes along to throw the existence of a club into question.

And so PFC Sochi lined up against Krasnodar on 18th May 2024 with a million questions hanging in the air at Fisht about what is to become of the players, staff, fans, and stadium on the coast of the Black Sea in the event of a bad result. It was high tide for PFC Sochi and the waves of the Russian First League were licking at their ankles. A 6–1 win against relegation rivals Nizhny Novgorod gave Sochi a small hope that if they win their last two games, they could still pull off a miraculous escape. The wind was immediately taken out of their sails though as Krasnodar scored from a corner in the fifth minute of the game. Sochi did rally with goals in the 43rd and 73rd minutes, and for a brief 10 minutes, it seemed like the great escape could really be possible, but two more goals from Krasnodar in the dying moments to confirm the worst, Sochi were relegated at the full-time whistle. Roberto Moreno announced after the game that he has accepted an offer to extend his contract for three more years in spite of the result, the reward for stewarding the club through a much more spirited second half of the season, but immediately rumours have begun to swirl that CSKA Moscow would be trying to lure him away. This could be a blip in the long run, it could be one brief season in a lower league and then onwards with the plan. But as they fall back into the Russian First League from whence they came, they may be thinking back to their first season there. It is worth noting that the teams that finished 1st and 3rd in 2018–19, either side of PFC Sochi in their first ever season, were Tambov and Tom Tomsk. Both of those teams have been dissolved in the five seasons since, after 8 and 66 years of existence respectively. You can’t help but wonder whether those two, sitting alongside Dynamo St. Petersburg and many other formerly-great, now-defunct clubs in the recent history of Russian football, may be getting some more company before too long.

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