Premier League – Newspaper Kommersant No. 149 (7350) dated 17.08.2022

The general meeting of the clubs of the Russian Premier League (RPL) at its extraordinary meeting unanimously voted to approve Alexander Alaev as president of the organization. The former president of the National Football League (FNL) and general secretary of the Russian Football Union (RFU) served as interim head of the RPL after the recent resignation of Ashot Khachaturyants and was the only candidate in the elections. The term of office of Mr. Alaev will be five years.

Alexander Alaev became the eighth president in the history of the Premier League, which was founded in 2001 and has since been responsible for the Russian Championship, including all organizational and financial issues related to it. He received the support of the RPL clubs even after the resignation of Ashot Khachaturyants, who announced his resignation on June 27, and now he has simply been approved in his position, having removed the prefix “acting”. Representatives of all 16 teams voted for Alaev’s candidacy unanimously.

At 42, Alexander Alaev is already a fairly experienced functionary and has long occupied very high positions in the Russian football hierarchy. Back in 2013, he rose to the level of CEO of the RFU, and at the end of 2017, due to the suspension of Vitaly Mutko’s activities, he even acted as president of the main governing body of domestic football. From 2019 until his election as the head of the RPL, Alaev was the Secretary General of the RFU, and in 2021 he also headed the FNL, which unites the first and second divisions of the Russian championship. So it is not surprising that a manager with such a background stood at the helm of the RPL.

The attitude towards the new first person of the Premier League was to some extent expressed by the president of Ural, Grigory Ivanov. “Everyone knows the work of Alaev, how he actually led the RFU in preparation for the World Cup,” TASS quotes him. “He did a lot for football. I think that under him the league will flourish and there will be unity in it. In addition, the clubs expect that Alaev will retain the course of his predecessor Ashot Khachaturyants. “Thanks to Ashot Rafailovich, the league has significantly increased its revenues, and I hope this trend will continue,” said Evgeny Melezhikov, general director of Spartak.

Indeed, the ex-president of the RPL left Alaev a rich legacy. Even in a very short period of leadership of the Premier League, Khachaturyants achieved serious success in the commercial direction, increasing its income at times. For example, thanks to a new contract with Match TV, the RPL will earn 13.2 billion rubles over the next two seasons, and another 15.4 billion over the next two seasons. The RPL should receive about 11 billion rubles from its official bookmaker, Winline. for four seasons. Agreement for almost 800 million rubles. per year with the new title sponsor of the RPL – the Mir payment card system – was also prepared by Ashot Khachaturyants.

Another thing is that in organizational terms, the Premier League still has a lot of problems, which, moreover, were superimposed on the international isolation of Russian football. Perhaps the most relevant of them is the sharp drop in attendance at the Russian Championship against the backdrop of the adoption of the law on the so-called Fan ID. In particular, many active fans were categorically against the mandatory issuance of an individual fan passport and are already boycotting matches. And in general, the mechanism for issuing a Fan ID still raises questions and is associated with technical difficulties, which Alexander Alaev admitted. It was the return of the audience to the stands that he called his priority operational task. According to him, this “needs dialogue and compromises with representatives of fan movements.” “I will definitely talk to the fans,” the president of the RPL said at a press conference after his election. “The State Duma is already planning to hold a round table on this issue. Hope the situation gets back to normal soon. I would like us not to spend a lot of time on this and get the fans back to the stadium as quickly as possible.”

In addition, according to Alexander Alaev, the Premier League needs to change in order to attract a new, primarily youth audience. “We will work actively not only on TV, but on all platforms,” said the President of the RPL. “We are talking about new content. Each audience needs its own presentation. Young people are probably no longer interested in watching football all 90 minutes. Maybe we were too traditional, it’s time for us to change.”

Alexander Alaev generally believes that the Premier League should be more open, including in matters relating to refereeing. So, the RPL is already thinking about making public negotiations in the VAR system, which will help fans better understand the decisions of the referees. Alaev also said that the Premier League is looking for an opportunity to improve the technical equipment of VAR, which now, after the refusal of the main equipment supplier, operates in a limited mode, which does not allow to clearly determine the offside position using offside lines.

Alexander Ilyin