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Friends in high places fuel Dick Advocaat's empire building

by Phil Gordon, The Times

The Kremlin has now fallen under the St Petersburg spell, just as easily as Wall Street. Next on the agenda? The City of Manchester Stadium. Anyone writing off Zenit St Petersburg as a team who got lucky should realise that the smart money around Europe is on Dick Advocaat’s men to win the Uefa Cup final.

Unheard of outside Russia until a few seasons ago, Zenit have been making up for lost time in a big way. Their biggest fan is Dmitri Medvedev, recently elected to succeed Vladimir Putin as President of Russia. Medvedev, the son of St Petersburg teachers, is hoping to put affairs of state to one side for 24 hours to travel to Manchester to watch the team he has helped to turn into a leading player in European football.

The 42-year-old should have no problem getting a ticket. Before running for office he stood down as chairman of Gazprom, the oil and gas company that has bankrolled Advocaat’s £ 50 million spending spree on players. Gazprom is also funding Zenit’s new stadium and, even though costs for the 65, 000-seat arena — at the moment the club use the modest Petrovsky Stadium, with a capacity of only 21, 000 — have doubled to about £ 300 million, Gazprom is not flinching about footing the bill.

Medvedev has a quadruple dream of his own to dwarf that of Walter Smith. Before leaving Gazprom, which he helped to build into the third-largest corporation in the world, Medvedev stated that he wanted to quadruple its value to tip $1 trillion by 2017.

Ironically, that date will be the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The events that broke centuries of power and privilege unfolded in St Petersburg’s streets in October 1917 and spread across the great land that became the Soviet Union. Zenit, a club known in its early days as Bolshevik, symbolises Russia’s transformation from communist backwater to capitalist headhunter.

Russia’s extraordinary growth and explosion of wealth — funded by the oil money — started seeping into its football several years ago. Gazprom hooked up with Zenit in 2006 and has given Advocaat every help he needs in building a team who stunned the traditional stronghold of Moscow by being crowned Russian champions in November last year.

Advocaat has a squad that contains Czechs, Slovaks, two South Koreans, an Argentinian, a Ukrainian, a Dutchman (Fernando Ricksen, the former Rangers defender), a Turk and a Belgian. Nicolas Lombaerts, a 23-year-old defender who was signed from Ghent in Belgium, said that the original lure was a substantial contract, but the hidden benefit is the city itself. St Petersburg is home to six million people, but its historic buildings, which have made it a Unesco World Heritage Site, soothed Lombaerts’s homesickness.

“It is just like a Western city,” he said. “I can get anything I want here. The food is also good and the architecture is wonderful. I was not sure about moving to Russia when I first got the offer to join Zenit, but I came here to look at the city and was impressed.

“I know that it might have been tough to live in Russia ten years ago, and even now in some other cities, but St Petersburg is a great place to live. We are all very well paid by the club and that helps. The only thing I miss about Belgium is chips and mayonnaise.”

Gazprom’s immense resources are invested in Zenit through the club’s sports director, Konstantin Sarsania, a Dynamo Moscow player turned television pundit and agent. A controversial figure, he is the agent for Alexander Kerzhakov, the Russia forward who joined Seville in January 2007 in a transfer that raised questions about conflicts of interest.

Pavel Pogrebnyak, the 24-year-old striker, arrived from Tom Tomsk, the Russian club, in 2006 and Advocaat signed Alejandro Dominguez, the Argentinian striker, from Rubin Kazan, another Russian club, for £ 4 million in December. Then there is Fatih Tekke, the 30-year-old Turkey forward, who cost £ 7 million from Trabzonspor, of Turkey.

The player likely to be best known to Rangers fans — apart from Ricksen, who is struggling to hold down a first-team place these days — is Anatoliy Tymoschuk, the Ukraine midfield player, who was linked with Celtic and a number of Barclays Premier League clubs. He cost £ 10 million from Shakhtar Donetsk — a fee far higher than Celtic were discussing — and such is the association of Zenit with Gazprom that it has been rumoured that the fee was paid partly in gas, leading to an emphatic denial from Shakhtar.

“I hereby state that there is no gas element in the agreement for the transfer of Anatoliy Tymoschuk to Zenit, nor was this even possible,” Serhiy Palkin, the Shakhtar general director, said. “Shakhtar is a soccer club, not a gas broker.”

Zenit made minimal impact on the Moscow-dominated Soviet football scene. Their only title win came in 1984, which was scant reward for the partisan backing they received as the only club in Russia’s second-largest city. Advocaat’s influence, shaped by his time in Scotland, the Netherlands and South Korea, has rapidly changed that picture.

He recruited Kim Dong Jin, known to the Dutch coach from his time as South Korea manager, while Dominguez, a former River Plate player, has brought South American movement and trickery on the ball. The importance of Gazprom to Zenit was underlined by Alexej Blynow, the club spokesman, who said recently: “Without doubt, thanks to Gazprom, we have outstanding possibilities, but, equally, one must use and deploy these sensibly.”

Nor will Zenit be without backing in Manchester. More than 12, 000 fans have applied to the British Consulate-General in St Petersburg. The Russians are coming.

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