Anyhow they don’t take anyone as a driver – Newspaper Kommersant No. 192 (7393) of 10/15/2022

The club of the Russian Premier League (RPL) Lokomotiv on Friday announced the change of the chairman of the board of directors. The place of Alexander Plutnik, who served as head of the council since the end of 2020, was taken by the former Deputy Minister of Sports of the Russian Federation, one of the key defendants in the Russian doping scandal, Yuri Nagornykh. Recall that earlier the railroad has already lost head coach Josef Zinnbauer and sports director of the club Thomas Zorn. All this is the result of the team’s failure in the championship – Lokomotiv is in 14th place.

Friday football club “Locomotive” announced an important reshuffle in the leadership of the team. Yuri Nagornykh took the post of chairman of the board of directors of the club. He replaced Alexander Plutnik. The latter decided to resign from his position and leave the board of directors.

It should be noted that personnel changes in Lokomotiv are taking place against the backdrop of a severe gaming crisis experienced by the team. Since the beginning of the current championship, the railway workers have only won two matches, drawn three times and lost seven times. Moreover, five defeats occurred in the last five matches. As a result, the team dropped to 14th place. That is, it is one step away from the zone of unconditional relegation and seriously risks its place in the RPL.

The result of Lokomotiv’s failures on the field has already been the dismissal of the team’s head coach Josef Zinnbauer and sports director Thomas Zorn.

After their departure as acting head coach was appointed Andrey Fedorov (previously he served as the team’s senior breeder, and since March last year he headed the Lokomotiv-Kazanka railway workers’ farm club). The most likely successor to Zinnbauer is considered, according to “Sport-Express”Mikhail Galaktionov, now head of Nizhny Novgorod.

Interestingly, even in the summer, before the start of the season, Mr. Plutnik announced the fight for the title as Lokomotiv’s goal for the season, promising that there would be more important transfers. An important transfer really happened. Only he was sent to leave the team of railway workers – Lokomotiv sold “Nice” Alexis Beck Beck for €12 million. About the same amount, Lokomotiv bought five players, but none of them has yet become the savior of the team. “It was a logical decision, they didn’t do their job,” Yury Semin, the former coach of Lokomotiv, who is associated with almost all the successes of the railway workers, told TASS, commenting on the decision to dismiss the club’s management.

Mr. Semin also expressed the hope that with the arrival of Yuri Nagornykh to manage Lokomotiv, things will improve.

“A new functionary has come who has been in the sport for a very long time, I think he should succeed. Will things get better in Lokomotiv after the change of leadership? A functionary has come who has a lot of work to do, we hope that he will cope,” said Yuri Semin.

Yuri Nagornykh is indeed an experienced sports functionary. He has been on the Board of Directors of Lokomotiv since 2019. In 2017-2018, Mr. Nagornykh was a member of the Supervisory Board of the CSKA sports club, in 2018 he was appointed Chairman of the Board of the Russian sports society Lokomotiv. But the loudest period in the career of Mr. Nagornykh is his tenure as Deputy Minister of Sports of the Russian Federation (from 2010 to 2016). In December 2017, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) banned Mr. Nagornykh any participation in the Games. This was the result of an investigation into the Russian doping case by the IOC. Its experts concluded that Mr. Nagornykh was allegedly directly involved in the operation of the doping system at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Alexander Petrov