Russia drops football federation head over financial dispute

The Russian Football Union has voted out president Nikolai Tolstykh in the culmination of longrunning tensions over how the game is run in the 2018 World Cup host nation.

Tolstykh’s three years in charge of Russian football were marked by a crackdown on fan racism which saw some of the country’s biggest clubs punished, but his time in office was also blighted by financial problems.

Tolstykh came under particular fire for his role in signing national team coach Fabio Capello to a new contract worth a reported €7 million a year in January 2014, and his removal as president calls into question the Italian coach’s future in Russia.

The RFU’s long-running financial difficulties led to Capello going unpaid for seven months until February.

Meanwhile, the national team has floundered on the pitch, exiting last year’s World Cup in the group stage. Capello’s team has won just one of its last eight competitive games, not including a Euro 2016 qualifier against Mon- tenegro which was abandoned due to crowd trouble, with Russia awarded the win by default.

Following the 235-196 vote at the RFU congress to remove Tolstykh, his deputy, 88-year-old former Soviet national team player Nikita Simonyan, takes over as acting president until new elections are held. Tolstykh’s firing was not related to this week’s turmoil at FIFA, since Russian football officials support FIFA president Sepp Blatter near-unanimously.

The RFU is 1.48 billion rubles ($28 million) in debt, ran a deficit of 180 million rubles ($3.4 million) last year and is at risk of bankruptcy, a financial commission reported at Sunday’s conference.

“There are problems and we don’t hide them,” Tolstykh said in televised comments, saying the financial problems dated from before his arrival and that he had improved the situation. “Today in the RFU we don’t have that irresponsible attitude to spending.”

Critics accused him of presiding over a shambolic regime.

“With his ambitions and endless breaches of the RFU constitution, Mr. Tolstykh has done everything to finally wreck the image of Russian football,” said Anzor Kavazashvili, formerly head of the RFU’s anti-match-fixing unit.

The RFU has long struggled financially and been dependent on help from state-run companies or wealthy patrons. In January, billionaire and Arsenal part-owner Alisher Usmanov stepped in to clear the debt to Capello with a loan, but in May, Capello’s agent told Russian media that the wages had been delayed again.