FIFA and UEFA jointly decided to suspend all Russian national teams and clubs from participating in each other’s competitions until further notice, which implies the exclusion of Russia from the Qatar 2022 World Cup.

These measures were adopted today by the FIFA Council Bureau and the UEFA Executive Committee, respectively, the highest decision-making bodies of both institutions in these urgent matters, given the invasion of Ukraine by Russia that began on the 24th. .

“Football is fully united and in full solidarity with all the affected people in Ukraine. Both presidents hope that the situation in Ukraine will improve significantly and quickly so that football can once again be a vector of unity and peace among peoples,” they said. both organisms.

https://www.laestrella.com.pa/deportes/futbol/220228/fifa-uefa-suspenden-selecciones-clubes-rusia

Billionaire Roman Abramovich, who has been asked by Ukraine to mediate peace talks after leaving Chelsea, and his compatriot Dmitri Rybolovlev, owner of Monaco, are among the war-stained Russian names such as Gazprom, which It will no longer be a sponsor of clubs like the German Schalke 04.

Days after announcing that he was leaving the administration of English Chelsea, to leave it in the hands of the club’s foundation, Abramovich has received a request from the Ukrainian government to act as a mediator in search of peace between Ukraine and Russia, according to the spokesman for the multimillionaire.

Orphaned at the age of four and raised in a remote region close to Siberia, Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich’s fortune was forged in the dismemberment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The ‘perestroika’ allowed it to take over assets and companies that had belonged to the Soviet government for ridiculously low prices compared to market value.

In this promotion, his good relationship with Boris Berezovsky, who became a millionaire selling cars in Russia and was a good friend of then President Boris Yeltsin, had a lot to do with it. That was the hit of Abramovich, who together with Berezovsky acquired the oil company Sibneft in 1995 for just 100 million pounds, through a controversial system of loans for shares.

To facilitate the deal, Abramovich admitted years later in a London court that he had bribed Russian officials to give the go-ahead. This explained why only £100 million was paid for the company. By the beginning of 2000, Sibneft had a turnover of more than 2,000 million pounds.

It was in January 2003 when Abramovich took the step of getting into European football and buying Chelsea, for an amount close to 90 million euros. His goal was to get the London team to go from being just another candidate to dominating European football. And he got it.

Since their rise to power, Chelsea have won 18 titles, including two European Cups. It only took two seasons to win the Premier League for the first time in 50 years and the world football scene can no longer be understood without the Stamford Bridge club.

Abramovich’s situation as owner, however, has been tumultuous since 2018, when he was unable to renew his investor visa due to poor relations between Russia and the United Kingdom. He took an Israeli passport and has only visited London once since then, in November 2021. Last week, the Russian oligarch announced that he was leaving the administration of the club in the hands of his foundation, stepping aside until the war is over. between Ukraine and Russia.

With the sale of his shareholding in Sibneft in 2005 to Gazprom, Abramovich pocketed some 11,000 million euros, which he then reinvested a year later in the purchase of the Evraz steel company. This is his biggest financial asset right now.

In the political sphere, Abramovich has always maintained a close link with Vladimir Putin, as confirmed by a court in England in September 2012, which declared that “he has privileged access to the president”, but that there was no evidence that he could ‘ manipulate him’. In recent times and due to the bad relations between the United Kingdom and Russia, Abramovich has distanced himself from Putin.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also caused the French press to talk these days about Dmitri Rybolovlev, the Russian millionaire who controls one of the historic French football clubs, after having bought two-thirds of Monaco in 2011.

Although the US authorities consider him one of the oligarchs close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the French press has clarified that Rybolovlev’s proximity to the president is not such, so his presence in the club’s management should not be compromised .

The owner of Monaco, who delegated the administration of the entity to another Russian, Oleg Petrov, in 2019, is ranked 391st on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest people.

Art collector and protagonist of a very expensive divorce in 2015, Rybolovlev has been involved in bizarre legal problems, first in a case against the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier and then accused of corruption in 2018 for his close relations with the judicial authorities. of the Principality.

Also in tiny Monaco, the basketball club, one of the leaders in the French league, has been in the hands of Aleksej Fedoricsev, a businessman of Russian origin although with a Monegasque and Hungarian passport, since the end of January.

Fedorocsev replaced Sergey Dyadechko, a Ukrainian businessman who took the team to the elite and remains a minority shareholder and vice president of sports operations.

Proper names aside, the crisis is already affecting the Russian state consortium Gazprom and its sponsorship contracts in the sports field. Schalke 04, currently in the second category of German football, has terminated it after a meeting of the board of directors and the supervisory board of the entity.

The contract with Gazprom was valid until 2025 and guaranteed Schalke 9 million euros a year. In the case of a promotion to the first category, Gazprom would have paid 15 million euros per year.

The club, whose relations with the Russian firm had been the subject of criticism among its fans, has assured that its “financial viability is not jeopardized by this decision” and that it will soon present a new sponsor.