Language brought to Spartak – Newspaper Kommersant No. 178 (7379) of 09/27/2022

Moscow Spartak, which came under the full control of LUKOIL at the end of the summer, seems to have completed the formation of top management, which, as chairman of the board of directors, was headed by the first vice president of the oil company, Alexander Matytsyn. Of the new characters in the leadership of the club, the most curious, apparently, should be recognized as the Englishman Paul Ashworth. He has been working in football for two decades, but he has never reached a truly high level, but he knows Russian and has experience in Russia – however, short and rather specific.

Spartak Moscow announced a series of personnel changes in the club’s management. All of them were the result of an event that occurred at the end of August. Then LUKOIL announced that he gained control of 100% of the shares of Spartak. Also, the property of the oil company, which for almost 20 years was officially the club’s key sponsor, was transferred to the home stadium of the red-and-white Otkritie-Bank Arena. At the same time, Leonid Fedun, who has led the club since 2003 (he owned almost a third of its shares), announced his resignation from the post of president of Spartak.

Most of the changes concern the board of directors of the club. Together with Alexander Matytsyn, First Vice-President of LUKOIL, who took the post of its chairman, it included three top managers of the oil company – Pavel Zhdanov, Ivan Maslyaev and Evgeny Khavkin, Spartak General Director Evgeny Melezhikov, President of the Spartak Spartak Academy Sergey Rodionov, and also independent directors Oleg Malyshev and Yusuf Alekperov. telling TASS about the tasks of the body, Mr. Matytsyn singled out “the creation of a more transparent collegial mechanism for making decisions and distributing funding” as a priority. When solving it, he promised to rely “on the management model of LUKOIL, the effectiveness of which has been proven by the company’s 30-year history.”

Another appointment of “Spartak” announced in a separate press release on the club’s website, announcing that its new sporting director (previously held by Italian Luca Cattani) will be Englishman Paul Ashworth.

Mr. Ashworth, who is 52 years old, is an extremely curious character. Without a professional football background, he began working in coaching or “related” positions at the dawn of the decade before last, when he was very young.

At the same time, he constantly moved around the world, finding himself in Europe, then in Africa, then in Asia. It so happened that most of his career, in which there were never truly high-level teams, was spent where they speak Russian. And it was the knowledge of the Russian language, as Spartak admitted, that was the factor that played an “important role” in the appointment of Paul Ashworth to one of the key posts in the club.

Mr. Ashworth taught him, for example, in Latvia, as well as in Kazakhstan, where, at the end of the previous decade, he apparently achieved the most noticeable success. Astana, in which he was the executive director, won the local championship, and in 2019, at the group stage of the Europa League, they managed to defeat Manchester United – 2: 1. True, the team lost the rest of the matches in the group and took the last place in it.

Paul Ashworth once brought to Russia. In 2005, he spent several months spent in Rostov, who invited him to the position of just a sports director, but after an unsuccessful start in the championship, turned him into an interim mentor.

Mr. Ashworth led the Rostovites in this status in only two meetings – which ended in a draw with Rubin and lost with Amkar. Soon the Englishman left Russia, saying that he was persistently “asked” to lose the match with the Kazan club.

Given the peculiarities of the biography, we can say that in Spartak, Paul Ashworth will find himself in completely unusual conditions for a specialist accustomed to modesty. The Moscow club, which had a good start in the season (now it ranks fifth, but is only a point behind the top three), was already among the wealthiest in the Russian Premier League (RPL), and now, after the replacement of owners and top officials, Looks like he’s willing to spend even more. Anyway, in an interview TASS Alexander Matytsyn noted that “the inherited budget for 2022-2023 does not allow the club to solve the main strategic tasks: strengthening the sports block, team composition and infrastructure development”, therefore “funding will be increased”: “With the advent of the new sports director, Spartak hopes to quickly get short-term and long-term strategies to strengthen the team. As part of this plan, a new budget will be approved in October, which will allow the club and the coaching staff to ensure a quality winter transfer campaign.”

Alexey Dospekhov