Kuban Stadium before a game against Zenit last season. Photo: Danny Armstrong
Being a football fan in Sochi isn’t the easiest thing. Although the city has the top modern Fisht Stadium, built for the Winter Olympics in 2014, and adjusted for the 2018 World Cup, the city’s best football club, FC Sochi, play in the Second Division South, the third tier, where they are currently 5th, 15 points from promotion.
Nevertheless, Sochi could be about to earn a ticket to the Football National League, as the club could take Kuban Krasnodar’s spot in the division according to Sportbox, who also report that a number of Kuban players have already agreed to join Sochi in case the club does in fact get Kuban’s spot.
This is a new version of a story that has often been discussed in the past. Just a few years ago, it was rumoured that Kuban could move to Sochi, but now things have been changed around.
The reason for this is most likely the deep crisis Kuban find themselves in. Ever since reaching the Cup final in May 2015, the club has been on a steady downhill slope, both on and off the pitch, and this season has been no different. The Green-Yellows were relegated from the Premier League last season, and they are currently 10th in the FNL with no hope of returning to the finest company for next season.
For years, the club has accumulated a massive debt, which Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of Krasnodar Krai who owns the club, in March stated to be €31.17 million, an enormous amount for a club that average 3,700 spectators per game, and have very limited earnings from sponsors and merchandise sales.
For the same reason, Kondratyev has recently been forced to respond to rumours of the club being on the verge of bankruptcy as it continues to look for both investors and sponsors.
So far however, the search remains largely unsuccessful, and ever since the failed attempt to rebrand the club as the ‘people’s team’ in 2015, when they signed Andrey Arshavin and Roman Pavlyuchenko, Krasnodar Krai has shown little ability to do what’s necessary to return to club to its former glory, something that led a group of fans to write an open letter to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in October last year asking for help to find a sponsor.
Moving Sochi to the FNL would also solve one of the World Cup’s big problems, the fear of the so-called white elephants, used to describe empty stadiums with no clubs attached. This season, Sochi have played their home games at the old Sochi Central Stadium, which is just a shadow of the top modern Fisht Stadium.