Sheriff Tiraspol, conquerors of Real Madrid and, since Tuesday night’s stunning 2-1 win at the Bernabeu, the worst-kept secret in European football, are a team from nowhere.
It isn’t just that the place where they play their home games – the diplomatically unrecognised proto-state Transnistria – isn’t named on maps or represented internationally. What makes this place otherworldly is that it lies inside a kind of legal wormhole, a microclimate where all the normal conventions of doing business seemingly can’t penetrate.
Until now, the impact of this zone of unregulated economic activity had been mostly felt only locally. Yet Sheriff’s victory against Real has finally brought one of the products of this “nightmarish Disneyland” – in the words of one OSCE diplomat – to the world’s attention. Because in Transnistria, all roads lead back to Sheriff.
In Moldova proper, Transnistria’s estrangement seems not to bother ordinary people, nor is there any stirring, nationalistic rhetoric echoing from the corridors of power about reclaiming this rebellious sliver from the separatists. Critics say this is because powerbrokers in the Moldovan capital Chisinau benefit just as much from frontier law in the ‘republic’ as those in Tiraspol. Whatever the truth, Transnistria makes its own laws, when it bothers to make them at all. At the back of it all, Sheriff’s hand guides the process along.
It began in 1990 in the last days of the Soviet Union. The authorities in the Russian-speaking region near Moldova’s eastern border, fearing the unification of an independent Moldova with Romania, proclaimed Transnistria’s intention to remain part of the USSR as a lone republic. When the Union fell the following year, Transnistria took up arms to fight off a disorganised and poorly planned campaign from Chisinau to reunite Moldova, and the rebels in Tiraspol put down the roots of their unrecognised, de facto state.
The Sheriff company was born in 1993. Its directors were oligarchs in the definitive sense – ‘entrepreneurs’ in newly capitalist eastern Europe who grew rich by exploiting political connections. In Sheriff’s case, a deal was struck between the government of Transnistria’s first president, Igor Smirnov, and the nascent company allowing them to bring food produce for general sale into the republic customs-free.
Sheriff supermarkets bearing the company’s unmistakable five-point star soon sprang up across the region. In a stroke, the organisation had transformed itself from a smuggling ring operating across Transnistria’s unregulated border with Ukraine – the Black Sea, a traders’ gateway to legal and illicit riches alike, lies only a few kilometers to the south – into a credible business, its success virtually ring-fenced by government patronage.
“Because of the historical trade relationship between Chisinau and Odessa [the Black Sea port], Sheriff have been able to accumulate huge resources of contraband,” says former Moldovan sports minister, Octavian Ticu. “Sheriff have made an economic empire this way. They have made a monopoly of provisions.”
Then, in 1996, the football club was founded. But domestic success – 20 Moldovan league titles and counting – was never the overall goal; qualification for the Champions League was always the pot at the end of the rainbow for Sheriff’s president, the former KGB agent Viktor Gushan.
To achieve it, Sheriff scoured the globe for unrecognised talent, embarking on one of the most diverse recruitment drives anywhere in the world. Players from Burkina Faso, Bolivia, Curacao, Trinidad and Malawi have joined signings from more obvious destinations like Argentina and Brazil in a revolving door of new arrivals and departures.
“Don’t confuse the football team with the corporation,” says Peter Lulenov, a member of Transnistria’s football federation. “They are not the same. But everything is connected. Football and economic trade move in parallel and in the same direction.”
In the summer, Sheriff launched their most audacious overhaul yet, signing virtually an entire new first team and adding Luxembourg, Niger, the Ivory Coast, Mali and Peru to the list of nationalities represented. The cost of this recruitment drive, like everything else to do with the way the club is financed, is known only to those on the inside – transfer fees are never disclosed, and Sheriff treat even everyday business with secrecy. The club is virtually closed to access from the press.
The irony of Sheriff is that, despite the financial indulgence that has gone into constructing the project, their home town is a living museum of the USSR, a solemnly Soviet time warp where the hammer and sickle flies from government buildings and crumbling, grey apartments line cracked and broken roads. An almost obsessive nostalgia for Communist iconography remains, in the middle of which Sheriff, a team from nowhere, have quietly spent their way to the summit of European football.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3m3iFuI
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