Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  He then began to tell me about Dynamo. The Ministry of the Interior controlled the club in Soviet days, but Lobanovski, who was considered to be club president as well as manager, had striven to free Dynamo from the ministry’s control. He wanted Dynamo to turn “professional,” to make its money from sponsors, like the clubs he saw in the West.

  Dynamo had fans in high places. The late Vladimir Scherbitsky, leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, used to sit in the government box at the Republican Stadium. If he said, “Take that player off,” off the player would go. To thank him for his tactical tips, Dynamo built Scherbitsky a secret five-story underground palace in a town near Kiev. He was touched, and persuaded Ygor Ligachev to lobby the other members of the Politburo for permission for Dynamo to go professional. “But Ligachev was a conservative,” I objected. “He hated capitalism.” “Ligachev was a conservative,” agreed Roman, “but he was also a friend of Scherbitsky’s.”

  Ligachev did the trick, and in 1989, Dynamo became the first fully professional club in the USSR. Soon after, Lobanovski went off to coach in Saudi Arabia, and Dynamo got a new president. Victor Bezverkhy came with friends, who joined the board. “They decided to make the club rich, which was a good idea,” Roman said. “In Communist society that could be done legally, by observing formalities, which takes a long time and is expensive. They decided to do it another way.”

  (Roman really did talk like this. He knew exactly what he wanted to say, and said it simply. This was a lecture he had been a long time in preparing.)

  The first step Dynamo took was legal: they set up joint ventures, companies in which they put up part of the capital and a Western firm put up the rest. The profit from these is tax free, because in theory Dynamo is a sports club. A lot of money came in. The main joint venture, Dynamo Atlantic, made a profit of $1.5 to $2.5 million a month, in a country with one of the most disastrous economies in Europe. “It became plain,” said Roman, “that the club could be successful without even playing soccer.” To safeguard the joint ventures, Dynamo invited leaders of the mafia to join: Party officials and their families. “This was easy,” said Roman, “as most sportsmen had mafia ties.”

  Then Communism fell. “Dynamo Kiev is a famous soccer club, but now Western businessmen know Dynamo too. The word passes around among them that when you do business in Ukraine, the club can help, as it has ties. Take Zgursky, the ex-mayor of Kiev: he is now head of a commission responsible for renting premises for industry. These premises are in high demand. Zgursky gets a very large amount of money in dollars to give premises to people who have references from the club. Dynamo gives him money too.”

  “Bribery,” I said. “But what is a bribe?” Roman countered. “In this country you can bribe someone by taking him abroad. Zgursky comes on all Dynamo’s foreign trips. If someone asks, you can say that he is a fan who will shout, ‘Dynamo, score a goal!’ ”

  Rapid Vienna was visiting Kiev that Wednesday, and the return in Austria was two weeks later. Roman produced an expensive American laptop—I instantly regretted paying for the beer—and called up on the screen the list of guests accompanying Dynamo to Vienna. It looked as though the plane would be full, and the 90 or so names on Roman’s list read like the Ukrainian Who’s Who. There was Alexandre Denissov, head of the board of trustees of a major bank; “my name-sake, Roman Romaniouk,” son of the presidential envoy in a Kiev district where Dynamo is renting premises cheaply, or buying them, “which is very profitable now.” “Wait a minute,” said Roman, “I will find the name of the guy who is the boss of the mafia in Kiev.” He searched, but said he could not find it, which was perhaps the one sign I got that Roman was at all afraid.

  “Were they all in the Party?” I asked. “You can judge from their age,” he replied, for with customary efficiency, he had listed dates of birth. “Can it be that all soccer fans are born before 1940? No, but all the important people in Kiev were.” It was the ageism that he resented, not the corruption. There were only a few young guests on the list, all of whom were women. “Girls serving the interests of the bosses,” Roman explained.

  In the winter of 1990, when it was thought that the USSR was starving, I had read an article by a German aid worker who had driven a truckful of food to Kiev. On reaching the city, he and his friends were given a banquet by the local great and good. At the end of it, the great and good leaned back in their chairs and said to the Germans, “Well done. Now give us your truck, and we will distribute the food to the poor.” The Germans thanked them for the offer and rejected it. “Were the people at that banquet the Dynamo directors and their guests?” I asked Roman. He burst out laughing, delighted by the childish greed of it all: “very likely!”

  The Dynamo mafia was doing nicely, he said, and it paid as few taxes as it could. “Did you notice the driver who brought us here? His main job is driving money from Odessa to Kiev, and then from Kiev to Berlin. Usually he takes $600,000 to Kiev, and $2 million to Berlin, all in cash. He is guarded by the mafia. If you have money in a Ukrainian bank, and you transfer it to a foreign bank, you have to pay taxes on it. But if you carry it in cash to a foreign bank you avoid taxes. Our prime minister said on TV recently, ‘The government only has $20 million to spend on all its programs. We know that some organizations have ten times as much money to spend as we do, but they keep their money abroad.’ Now, if he is right that the government has $20 million to spend, then we could buy the government. But there is no need to.” Why not? Because there were still lots of legal ways to launder money. Ukraine, a young nation, was busy framing its laws, and for the moment there were plenty of loopholes.

  In the Mercedes, on our way back to Dynamo, I asked, “Don’t you ever need to rely on corruption in the cabinet itself?” “No,” said Roman. “Not at all?” He laughed again: “Isn’t that enough?” A country in which even the president earns $40 a month, while a local business has tens of millions to spare, is sure to be corrupt.

  “In fact, you could afford to pay the players far more than they earn now,” I said. “You could pay salaries to compete with the best in the Bundesliga, or in Britain. You could bring the best British players to Kiev.” “It’s true,” said Roman, “but if we paid salaries of £30,000 a month, the government and the Ukrainian public would get angry. It would be seen as tactless. Also, the people who run this club have a policy that to invest in the team is risky: to invest in production is safe.”

  The team was a source of income: Dynamo bought players cheaply in the old USSR and sold them at a profit to the West. To help me with an article I was writing for World Soccer, Roman gave me a list with each Dynamo player’s name, weight, height, age and the period his contract still had to run, all of it in English: a catalogue for foreign buyers. Recently I read that Dynamo Kiev might be about to go bankrupt. Perhaps the directors had decided that it was time to ditch the team.

  We tend to think of Dynamo as a soccer club, and yet their role in Ukraine makes sense. The country is backward, but thanks to Lobanovski, Scherbitsky, and various soccer players, its soccer club is modern and rich. European soccer has an economic system of its own. Juventus paid £3 million for Zavarov. How many other Ukrainian products do the Italians want to buy? From soccer, Dynamo had the initial capital they needed to bribe officials, buy protection, and put up money for joint ventures. Thanks to their regular European matches, the club’s officials already knew directors and sponsors of Western clubs, and Western TV executives and advertisers: in short, Western businessmen. They also knew the local political leaders, who hung around the club because they liked soccer. Probably no other Ukrainian company was as well placed.

  That Wednesday, a few hours before the Rapid match, I spoke to Roman for the last time on the pitch of the Republican Stadium. Dynamo athletes were running around the track, and Roman, guided by Austrian yuppies, was stapling advertisements onto boards. Many were for Dynamo’s joint ventures. “Will you beat Rapid?” I asked, and he admitted that soccer bored him. Instead he said: “Our jo
int ventures are not real.” What? “Foreign companies provide all their capital. Dynamo only lends its name, because if a company is a joint venture it pays less taxes, and Dynamo Kiev’s name helps in the Ukrainian market.” The foreign company then pays Dynamo around 50 percent of the sum it saves in taxes.

  It was then, in my last few minutes with Roman, that he told me the most interesting club secrets. He was going to Berlin on business the next day, and would not see me again. “Dynamo,” he told me, “has licenses to export nuclear missile parts, two tons of gold per annum and metals including platinum.” He asked me not to mention the gold, and I promised, and in the rest of the book I have honored such promises, but not in this case. “How did you get these licenses?” I asked. Through bribery. Also, he explained, if you publicly give the government $1 million, as a present to the nation, the government might be encouraged to give you a license to export goods worth far more.

  This was unfortunate: not only does a soccer club that exports nuclear missile parts endanger the world, but Ukraine needed its gold. The country was giving up the Russian rouble to establish its own currency, and only gold reserves could prevent the new currency from inflating. Two tons a year is a lot of gold, and inevitably, Ukrainian inflation is even higher than Russian.

  Outside the stadium, just before the match, Roman and I ran into Victor Bannikov, president of the Ukrainian Soccer Federation, who agreed to see me at ten the next morning. I arrived at quarter to ten to watch him drive off in a Lada, waving at me as he left.

  “Have a good time in Berlin,” I said to Roman, and he shook his head. He would be living modestly, he said: “The other guys, when they go abroad, spend $5,000 a day on their hotel, their limousine and their private helicopter.” We shook hands and I went to the press-box. It was the last I saw of him. I trust his career is thriving.

  It poured with rain that night. The Republican Stadium has no roof, which would be fine were it in Africa, and the few thousand spectators huddled at the back of the stand, where the rim of the tier above gave a modicum of shelter.

  In the pressbox, an Austrian journalist looked up in disgust. The woman in charge of the telephones had just put him through to the Viennese police. “Nothing has changed,” he announced, meaning that the fall of Communism had not made his life easier. “Nothing,” a colleague agreed, and the poorly connected one said, “The phones are as bad as ever, it still smells like it used to, and the place is still a ruin.” The exchange would have bemused the men who run Dynamo. A lot had changed. For one thing, they now earned several times more than Austrian journalists.

  Yet it was true that the parts of Dynamo that did not relate to business were still mired in Communism. The soccer team, for instance: no new Blokhins and Belanovs here. But the famous running off the ball was still largely intact, and Rapid was often made to look like old men. Dynamo won 1-0, with a goal from Pavel Yakovenko, one of two survivors from the Lobanovski years. At the final whistle the fans sprinted out of the stadium, sopping wet.

  The next morning, Professor Zelentsov sent his chauffeur-driven Lada round to collect me from the Dynamo Stadium. He was keen to see me, for now that Communism was gone he hoped to sell his ideas to Western clubs. As he put it: “I would like to pass on my methods, though only to reputable buyers.” I hope I can repay him for his help. Any soccer manager who happens to be reading this can write to Zelentsov c/o Dynamo Kiev, Kiev, Ukraine. No need for a more complete address: Dynamo is well-known over there.

  The problem with theory, Zelentsov began by saying, is that soccer depends on the players you have: “There is an idea, and there are executors of the idea.” So he had devised a scientific way of identifying the best players.

  He showed me his assistant, who now seemed to be playing a computer game. “There are many methods of measuring the capacity of a player,” Zelentsov said. “You can test his blood control, how he runs, how he jumps. I prefer to work with non-contact methods: to avoid getting AIDS, and so as not to give the player so much work that it tires him. There are lots of ways of testing, but I prefer the computer. For the player, also, it is interesting to work on the computer.” He had invented computer games to test soccer players.

  I asked: “Is it correct that you used these tests to pick the Soviet squad for the 1988 European Championship?” Zelentsov’s son-in-law had told me so. “There were 40 candidates, and with these tests we selected the first 20,” Zelentsov agreed. The squad he picked had baffled the press, but the USSR had reached the final. Zelentsov chastised me for citing just one instance. The tests were used often. If Dynamo was thinking of signing a player, the man took the tests, and the Dynamo squad was tested regularly.

  The assistant at the computer ran the first test. A line ran down the screen, a dot moved across the screen from left to right and the assistant tried to press a key just as the dot crossed the line. It was a test, Zelentsov explained, of reactions, nerve and balance. The assistant tried to place around ten dots, each of which moved at a different speed, and was given a score.

  Then it was my turn—my chance to see whether I could play for Dynamo. I did badly. The first time I scored 0.34, and the second time 0.42. Dynamo players, said Zelentsov, would normally score between 0.5 and 0.6, with higher scores ranging from 0.6 to 0.8. When a player was in form, or felt good (Zelentsov spoke of his “psyche”), he would do better than otherwise.

  In defense of my scores, I want to say that I think I distorted the exercise. When I placed a dot badly, I would become nervous and press the keys a few times, thus placing my next dot well off target. Admittedly, one of the qualities the test measured was nerve. Even so. Zelentsov looked downcast.

  I was resolved to do better on the next test, a typing test that measured endurance. I had to press one key as quickly as possible for a few seconds, to establish my maximum speed, and then I had 40 seconds to get in as many more presses as possible. The aim was to stay as close as possible to my maximum speed during the 40 seconds, which (try it) is a long time to press up and down on a key. This time I am sure I distorted the test. While I established my maximum speed Zelentsov told me not to lift my finger off the key, as this wasted time. From then on I kept my finger on the key and did better. Because of this, my speed barely fell off the maximum during the 40 seconds. I hope Zelentsov knew about problems like this, because otherwise strange choices might have crept into that 1988 team. Perhaps he was also measuring intelligence: if you took the tests in the wrong way, you failed. I got marks for endurance, the way my muscles work, my ability to achieve speed and my resistance to tiredness.

  Then came a memory test. The screen was divided into nine squares, and a different number under 100 appeared in each square and vanished after a few seconds. I had then to type the right number in each square. According to Zelentsov, this tested the ability to remember where teammates and opponents are on the pitch. (Perhaps he was a charlatan—I cannot say.) I played three screens and got all numbers right, scoring 97 percent. Of course I did: the kind of memory required was very like the kind used in academic work, to remember names and dates and so on, and I had just finished a university degree. The test suggested why good passers—Osvaldo Ardiles, Glenn Hoddle, Ray Wilkins, Graeme Souness, and most quarterbacks in American football—tend to be more intellectual than other players.

  The next test was very simple. The screen would suddenly flash white, and as quickly as possible after that I had to press the keyboard: a test of reactions. The average time I needed was 220 milliseconds, and a jubilant Zelentsov announced that this score would have been acceptable from a Dynamo player at the start of a season. I can honestly say that I have never felt prouder in my life.

  The last test I found impossible. A dot would trace a complicated trajectory through a maze, and then I had to retrace the path, using a joystick. But I could never remember the route, and the maze was so narrow and mazy, and moreover constantly in motion, that I was always bumping into walls. It was, of course, a test of coordination and memor
y, and it made me realize how extraordinary professional soccer players are. Not after years of practice could I have negotiated that maze.

  Using the scores, Zelentsov could tell the coach which aspects of a player’s game needed work. I said, “I see that these tests measure abilities required in soccer. But surely there are some abilities they cannot test?” He agreed: “Speed, for example, also depends on running technique. We can measure that elsewhere.” “And,” I said, “what if Zavarov and Belanov did these tests badly? They were still your best players. You had to pick them.” “Zavarov and Belanov,” replied Zelentsov, “even when they were out of form, had far higher results than the others.” Which players in the current side did best on these tests? “Did you see the match last night?,” he responded. “Then you have seen it for yourself.” “Yakovenko?” I guessed. “Yakovenko! Leonenko! Luzhny! Annenkov! Shmatovalenko!”

  Dynamo was good to me: along with Barcelona, Cape Town Hellenic, and the USA team, they were the nicest club I dealt with that year. (Orlando Pirates of South Africa and Sparta Prague were the rudest.) That Friday, on my last day in Kiev, President Bezverkhy made time to see me.

  His office was simple: brown walls, brown chairs, Communist furniture, and house plants. I mentioned this to Max, my interpreter, who replied scathingly: “But you don’t think his house looks like that!” Max had no time for Dynamo. He wore a ponytail, of which the shaven-headed disapproved, and he had learned to walk the other way when he saw tracksuits at night. The CinCin Cafe, opposite the Dynamo Stadium, is where these characters hang out, and when you next visit Kiev it is a place you might avoid.