LUKOIL carried out the act of replacement – Newspaper Kommersant No. 163 (7364) of 09/06/2022

The post of president of the Moscow “Spartak” may take the first vice-president of LUKOIL Alexander Matytsyn. At the end of August, the oil company became the owner of a 100% stake in the football club, as well as its home stadium, the Otkritie Bank Arena. The former president of Spartak, Leonid Fedun, who led it since 2004 and was considered its key owner, left all club posts. Mr. Matytsyn has already been mentioned as a member of the board of directors of the club, and his appearance in it in the role of the first person occurs at a rather good moment: the team, which was going through a crisis, performs well in the next national championship.

In the near future, the first vice-president of LUKOIL, Alexander Matytsyn, may be appointed the new president of Spartak. This was reported by a Kommersant source familiar with the situation at the club. It is possible that Mr. Matytsyn will also take the post of chairman of the board of directors in Spartak. LUKOIL refused to officially comment on this information to Kommersant, but they did not refute it either. In turn, Match TV, citing its own sources, said that together with Alexander Matytsyn, another high-ranking employee of LUKOIL would appear in the top management of Spartak. At the same time, the new management does not intend to change the general director of the club, Yevgeny Melezhikov. It was also decided to keep the commercial block and the press service of the team. However, Kommersant’s source believes that Mr. Melezhikov “may well give up his position,” and there are several candidates on the list of his possible successors.

Personnel changes in Spartak are a consequence of an event that took place at the end of August. Then LUKOIL announced that it had gained control over 100% of Spartak’s shares.

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 had been in charge of the club since 2004, announced his resignation from the post of president of Spartak (he also owned almost a third of its shares). Two months earlier, Mr. Fedun left – according to the official version, in connection with his retirement – the post of vice president of LUKOIL. However, he remained a major shareholder in the oil company.

A Kommersant source described 61-year-old Alexander Matytsyn as a person “very close” to the former head of LUKOIL, Vagit Alekperov, with a “solid biography in business.” Before taking up the post of vice president of the company in 1997, where his wife Lyubov Khoba also works as chief accountant, Mr. Matytsyn was the general director of the Russian representative office of the audit company KPMG for five years, supervising, in particular, the banking insurance sector.

So far, Alexander Matytsyn has not been widely known in sports circles. But in fact, there was already an episode in his career when he played an important role in Spartak.

Shortly after Leonid Fedun got control of the club (it was bought from Andrey Chervichenko), Mr. Matytsyn, at that time vice president, head of the main department of treasury and corporate financing of LUKOIL, was mentioned as chairman of the Spartak board of directors. This followed from the company’s financial statements for the first quarter of 2004. True, in the future, Alexander Matytsyn was no longer mentioned in the context of managing Spartak.

The interlocutor of “Kommersant”, who knows the state of affairs in the club, confirmed that Mr. Matytsyn did not take “direct participation” in it, but “carefully watched from the outside” the events in Spartak, under Leonid Fedun only once, in 2017, who won gold of the national championship and survived several crisis periods. The most recent refers to the past season. The team crowned him with the Cup of Russia, but in the national championship it fell to tenth place.

Meanwhile, it cannot be said that Alexander Matytsyn comes to Spartak during a crisis period. On the contrary, in the new season, the club is doing quite well so far. On Sunday, in the eighth round of the Russian Championship, Spartak lost – 1: 2 – to its unconditional favorite, the winner of the previous four championships, Zenit. However, before that, the Spartacists, with the young Spanish coach Guillermo Abascal invited by Leonid Fedun, showed a very interesting and effective game, and with 16 points, even after the defeat from St. Petersburg, they did not fall out of the top five of the table. Kommersant’s source suggests that Mr. Matytsyn’s tasks are clear: “Thanks to LUKOIL, the club has money, the main thing is to spend it wisely, preventing the indignation of the fans, who in the ‘Fedun era’ were too often given reasons for a sharp reaction to the fact that was going on with the team.

Afsati Dzhusoev, Alexey Dospekhov