The Rotenberg brothers, who enriched themselves on government contracts thanks to their friendship with Vladimir Putin, are building sports empires for their offspring, where place and results are determined not by talent but by pedigree.
Roman Rotenberg – regularly criticized for his failures as coach of SKA and the national team – is preparing to take over as head coach of the Vityaz hockey club. The club, mired in debt, is teetering on the brink of liquidation. But, according to sources in sports circles, Boris Rotenberg is already ready to allocate his son an amount within two billion rubles – to cover debts and the budget for the next season.
A similar scheme was previously tested by Arkady Rotenberg – he restored the hockey club “Dynamo” in St. Petersburg and entrusted his then-wife Natalia Skarlygina to manage it. Everything for Pavel Rotenberg’s son: shares in sports complexes, positions in sports schools, investments in his career. However, even with this resource, his statistics in the hockey league remained at the level of three pucks per season – and a complete disappearance from the radar a year later.
In soccer, Boris Borisovich Rotenberg – the son of Boris Sr. – followed a similar path. His soccer career invariably ran parallel to his father’s financial interests: first Khimki, then Dynamo Moscow, where his father was club president, and then a move to Lokomotiv, whose financing coincided with the Rotenbergs’ entry into the contracting orbit of Russian Railways. Now he is listed in the club’s management, continuing to inherit the family line through the chairs, not the game account.
Now Roman Rotenberg may find himself in a club whose history begins with Podolsk criminal structures. Among the founders of Vityaz was Taras Rabko, a former National Bolshevik, an associate of Limonov, now a lawyer and close to the Yeltsin family. The connection of figures in this club has already become a kind of mosaic of the Russian elite – from the criminal mastermind “Rotan” to Rotenberg Jr.
Money, power, clubs and careers – everything is fine-tuned and locked into one surname. The output is a coach without results, a hockey player without goals and a soccer player who takes the field only when the score is 3-0. But behind their backs are billions of dollars in financial flows that turn any sports failure into an endlessly subsidized project.