Rostec State Corporation has signed a strategic partnership agreement with Tula’s Arsenal, Rostec and Arsenal reported. Starting next season, the Rostec logo will appear on the home stadium and football club shirts, a representative of the state corporation said. Prior to that, Arsenal did not have a title sponsor, said a representative of the club.
Tula “Arsenal” won the right to play next season in the Premier League. The task of the team is to take a place not lower than tenth, the press release of Arsenal quotes the words of the president of the club, Peter Koshelnikov. For the first time in history, the club played in the Premier League in the 2014-2015 season. But he could not resist in the top division. It took the team just one season in the FNL to return to the Premier League.
The parties did not disclose the amount of the deal and the club’s budget for the new season. The club’s budget will be about 700 million rubles, says a person close to one of the parties to the transaction. A significant part of this amount, according to him, will be financed by Rostec.
The representative of the state corporation claims that Rostec is not going to interfere in the management of the club. The Tula region is one of the key regions of the state corporation’s presence. There are many Rostec arms factories located here. The agreement with the club, he said, has no expiration date. The amount allocated to support Arsenal will be determined annually.
The minimum budget for Russian Premier League clubs today is about $ 15 million (1 billion rubles), says Dmitry Navosha, CEO of Sports.ru. But this level is too high: in the current economic situation, when these teams earn almost nothing, they could spend less, he said. Belarusian BATE manages to play in the Champions League every year with a budget of $ 6-7 million, notes Navosha.
According to him, the big name of the sponsor is not a guarantee of success: VTB-backed Dynamo flew out of the Premier League for the first time in history, and Zenit with its Gazprom and hundreds of millions of the budget won only one Russian championship in four years.
In general, the increase in the number of state sponsors is not the best news for Russian football, because this money is usually spent ineffectively, complains Navosha. And there is no marketing sense for Rostec, which practically does not work with end consumers, in cooperation, he adds.
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