Russian football continues to dream of Europe, not daring to take a decisive step
If the ban on the participation of Russian football teams and the national team in tournaments under the auspices of UEFA continues, then we will have to move to play in Asia.
The honorary president of the Russian Football Union, former vice-president of FIFA Vyacheslav Koloskov stated this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
He believes that there is no point in Russia moving to the Asian Football League, “but life can force it.”
“It makes no sense why? Because the Asian Football League is lower in level of development than UEFA. I mean not only purely financial considerations; there can be no comparison at all. Our most successful confederation in the world is a confederation that holds a lot of all kinds of competitions for national teams and clubs. Competitions that bring huge profits to clubs and national football associations.
There is nothing like this in Asia, moreover, if you compare the infrastructure of football, training bases, the availability of qualified personnel, coaching, football, methodological - the best-selling management methodology, all this characterizes UEFA,” Koloskov said in an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets.
According to him, Asia lags behind Europe in everything related to youth and youth football.
“If some other individual teams are perhaps a little comparable to 15-16 teams in Europe, then everything else there is in simply poor condition. Therefore, of course, playing in Asia means taking two or three steps back compared to what Russian football was now.
But it was not by chance that I said that everything depends on how long the sanctions against national teams, club teams of the Russian Federation, and the ban on participation in official international competitions held under the auspices of FIFA and UEFA will be maintained. If this process drags on, it is possible that the Russian Football Union will have to decide on the transition to the Asian Confederation,” says the honorary president of the RFU.
He noted that a number of competitions are currently being held, the Russian team played several friendly games with representatives of the Asian Confederation and was invited to participate in the Central Asian Cup, which represents a fairly wide range of Asian football.
“This will allow us to become more familiar with infrastructure, logistics, financing and so on. Therefore, from my point of view, there is no need to rush now. We need to wait, firstly, to see what will happen in Europe. We now see a fairly positive trend in this regard; a number of federations have already allowed the participation of both Russian and Belarusian athletes.
Fencing, boxing, tennis have always been international sports, there were no restrictions, now the IOC has finally taken a step towards our and Belarusian athletes, announcing that everything will be decided by international federations for various sports. It is possible, taking into account our authority and experience, to achieve the lifting of sanctions from our football. If this does not happen, then it makes sense to study more deeply the system of organizing competitions in Asia,” Koloskov concluded.
Let us recall that Russian football was suspended from participation in European tournaments after the start of the SVO. Thus, the national team was not allowed to participate in the play-off match with the Poles for the right to qualify for the final part of Euro 2024. The same kind of restrictions were imposed on club football.
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