A quartet of state-of-the art, government-built stadia rise out of former marshland in energy-rich Kazakhstan’s futuristic capital Astana, but the Central Asian state’s soaring sporting ambitions have been shot down by the global oil slump.
Residents of the 900,000-strong city tasted the elite of European soccer earlier this season as FC Astana, backed by the country’s sovereign wealth fund, made national history by becoming the first Kazakh club to reach the group stage of the UEFA Champions League.
Along with the Astana Pro Team cycling outfit — famous for doping scandals as well as successes in the Tour de France — FC Astana form the lynchpin of the image-boosting Astana Presidential Sports Club launched in 2013 by the Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Photo: AFP
Since then, however, prices for the ex-Soviet state’s key crude export have more than halved from a high of more than US$100 per barrel, while an economic crisis in neighboring Russia has only compounded cashflow problems.
“There is a gap in funding for the Astana Presidential Sports Club, we cannot deny this,” said Darhan Kaletayev, managing director of the Samruk Kazyna sovereign wealth fund, as he sat in his office overlooking the young capital’s architecturally adventurous cityscape.
Budgets for the club’s basketball and hockey teams are to be cut, Kaletayev said, while funding for soccer and cycling has dropped in “real terms” after the national tenge currency shed half its value against the US dollar amid economic volatility last year.
FC Astana surprised many people by bowing out of Champions League Group C unbeaten at their 30,000-capacity Astana Arena, securing draws against Portugal’s SL Benfica, Spain’s Atletico Madrid and Turkey’s Galatasaray, but only picking up one point on the road.
However, the money-spinning novelty of qualification — worth approximately US$13 million to the club — must now become habit if the team is to retain and attract top players.
A recent game pitting FC Astana against their biggest domestic rivals FC Kairat — a club from the former capital Almaty — testifies to challenges the government faces in making its flagship soccer team sustainable.
“We call this our Yel Clasico,” joked Ablaikhan Muzhubayev, a fan decked out in FC Astana’s yellow and blue colors, punning “el Clasico,” the derby between Real Madrid and Barcelona, by substituting the Kazakh word yel, or people.
However, the game Astana won 1-0 in front of an official crowd of 11,000 people that appeared even smaller feels a far cry from one of the world’s most-watched sporting events.
“There was so much energy and noise at the Champions League games,” Muzhubayev said wistfully. “We need more of that for our domestic league.”
The game’s goalscorer Nemanja Maksimovic, embodies a recruitment blueprint that values up-and-coming talent over big names like former Arsenal star Andrei Arshavin, who cut a disinterested figure for the opposition.
However, the 21-year-old Serbian starlet, who scored the goal that fired FC Astana into this season’s Champions’ League, is also the type of player the club will struggle to keep in the new era of austerity.
“What we see in Kazakhstani soccer as a whole is that one club might have good finances one year and no finances the next,” FC Astana’s no-nonsense Bulgarian coach Stanimir Stoilov said on the sidelines of a training session at the arena.
“That [instability] will kill any team immediately,” said the coach, who was not allowed to discuss financial matters relating to FC Astana specifically.
Before FC Astana’s rise the Astana Presidential Sports Club was mostly famous for the Astana Pro cycling team that once included American Lance Armstrong, Spain’s Alberto Contador and Kazakhstan’s own Alexander Vinokourov.
Yet those riders and the team as a whole featured prominently in the doping plague that has bedeviled the sport and triggered calls for a permanent ban on Astana Pro and other outfits found guilty of multiple doping violations.
Kaletayev of Samruk-Kazyna said the scandals damaged Kazakhstan’s reputation and claimed the club has since turned itself around to become a “leader in anti-doping programs.”
Moreover, while new mega-projects have been ruled out as the country weathers its worst economic crisis in almost two decades, Kaletayev said Kazakhstan is only at the beginning of a “big journey” in sport.
“We want to encourage more sport at grassroots level and build up our profile in Paralympic sport. These are goals that are reachable for the moment,” he said. “Of course, everything depends on finances, but we are searching for co-sponsors and look to the future with much optimism.”
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