The head of the Samara region explained his speech in detail in a conversation with RB Sport:
— My work is related to the socio-economic development of the region, development in all areas. When they told me, I didn’t believe it myself, I thought they were swindlers, because it couldn’t be that 36 million in black cash were allocated for such schemes. I began to find out that such a system really exists. But there are no facts to support it.
As I said, there are no facts with which you can contact law enforcement agencies. These are conversations that are structured in such a way that there is no way to go anywhere. But it exists, we cannot remain silent about it, we need to make a decision on how to deal with it.
What should be done so that clubs stop paying referees? Not clubs. Still, they are not turning to the clubs, but to the governors who send taxpayers’ money to this system, to private business partners who allocate hundreds of millions of rubles to support professional football, and to all the people who are connected with this and indulge this system. There is no other choice when in such mutual responsibility and in clubs there are people who support this system, provide and receive the corresponding illegal commissions. We need to get rid of this, but it is not so easy to do, because there can be countless clubs in the top league, and those who do not do this and do not participate in this scheme are fewer than those who participate.
Suppose there are 10 such clubs. And in order to truly win once, you need, firstly, to create decent wage conditions for the refereeing corps. Although I looked and analyzed: now the salaries are sufficient to say that judges can support themselves without thinking about outside income in this system. Secondly, it is necessary to show objective information as openly and honestly as possible. And thirdly, you just need to hire all 10 people who stand behind the teams and not pay for corruption in the judiciary. If you made such a decision once, then from tomorrow there will be no such problem. It will metastasize, but we will not encourage this problem.
This will be our decision, the people who make decisions in Russian football. I am now forced to take this position as the government of the Samara region and the founder of “Wings of the Soviets”. We are all responsible and must take full responsibility.
Will my words affect Krylia Sovetov? Look, we have made a number of personnel decisions recently. They talked about a number of decisions, but for some reason they did not follow through. Look: some comparisons may be appropriate.
