“Lada” accelerated into the elite – Newspaper Kommersant No. 204 (7405) dated 11/02/2022

Next season, one of the most famous Russian hockey brands will probably return to the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL). Togliatti Lada submitted an application to join the league, which was reduced to 22 teams this season due to the departure of two foreign participants – the Finnish Jokerit and the Latvian Dynamo. This club, at the turn of the past and current centuries, was one of the giants of domestic hockey, but then found itself in a deep crisis and has already lost its place in the KHL twice.

Togliatti hockey club “Lada” announced that he sent an official application for inclusion in the list of participants in the championship of the Kontinental Hockey League next season. Commenting on this event, the general director of the club, Alexander Chebotarev, noted that he was acting in accordance with the “road map” received at the end of October from the president of the KHL, Alexei Morozov. Mr. Chebotarev specified that the league “may have issues of a technical nature”, but the club “will eliminate them in working order.” Alexander Chebotarev assured TASSthat the management of “Lada” has already “preliminarily announced” the budget for the next season to the leaders of the KHL and promised to fulfill the main financial requirements associated with the approval of the application. First of all, this refers to the observance of the so-called wage floor, which exists in the Russian championship along with the more familiar ceiling, set at around 900 million rubles. It refers to the minimum amount that each club must spend annually to secure players’ contracts.

In the current season, the “half salary” in the KHL is 315 million rubles.

Alexey Morozov has already warned that the final decision on Lada’s entry into the league will be made by its board of directors at the end of March, that is, before the end of the season. If it is positive, one of the most famous and most unfortunate domestic hockey brands will return to the league at the same time.

Once upon a time, Lada was firmly among the flagships of Russian hockey for a long period of time. It was she who happened to become a club that interrupted the absolute metropolitan hegemony in it. Since Soviet times, the gold of the national championship went exclusively to Moscow teams, but in 1994 Togliatti managed to win it. In 1996, they repeated this achievement, and in 1997 they added the European Cup, an analogue of the football European Champions Cup, to the collection of prizes.

“Lada”, whose power was based, among other things, on the effective work of the club’s player training system (its graduates are such celebrities as Alexei Kovalev, Viktor Kozlov, Ilya Bryzgalov, Vyacheslav Butsaev, Alexei Yemelin), for several more seasons was firmly included in the elite of Russian hockey and, for example, in the “zero” three times was the winner of the national championship. But her track record in the KHL looks quite modest.

The fact is that the formation of the league actually coincided with the beginning of a protracted crisis for Lada, which turned from a prosperous club into a club with a small budget, always experiencing financial difficulties.

Togliatti only once – in 2009, that is, in the first league championship, reached the play-offs, losing in the starting round to CSKA, and then invariably went out of the race after the end of the regular championship.

At the same time, the KHL has twice excluded Lada from its membership. This is the first time It happened in 2010 due to the fact that the club was unable to provide documents confirming the required amount of funding on time. Lada, which managed to build a new palace for 6 thousand spectators, again accepted into the league four years later, but only lasted three seasons. Another exception to the KHL explained “poor sports results”, “low level of wages for hockey players”, “high share of state budget funding”, which reached 70%, and low demand from the TV audience.

The appearance of Lada will allow the KHL, whose number of clubs has been almost constantly declining lately, and after leaving in the spring against the backdrop of a special military operation by the Finnish Jokerit and the Latvian Dynamo, it reached its lowest point for its entire existence, to increase it from 22 to 23. True , with the help of Togliatti, it is unlikely to raise the degree of competition. Having taken off from the KHL, they played in the All-Russian Hockey League (VHL), but even there they did not fight for victory. Now Lada is only sixth in the VHL championship, and its budget Sport24 estimated at about the same amount as “half the salary” in the elite league.

Alexey Dospekhov