Vladimir Romanov: "We do not buy football players in Russia"

- You are directly involved in all the affairs of your clubs. Do you love football so much or are you trying to miss nothing to avoid business losses?

- Everything is interconnected. In Lithuanian football, money is basically small. The club’s budget averages only 3-4 million euros, and there is no point in monitoring all organizational expenses. Another thing is the acquisition of players. Control is needed here. To avoid risk, not to buy a pig in a poke, it is necessary to collect a lot of information about a football player - from a doctor, a children's coach, his parents; all information is important, it complements the portrait of the player you see on the field. Undoubtedly, when I deal with transfers, I think about business, but, frankly, I have long been infected with the opportunity to create a team myself, finding players, selecting a coach. If you see one team and the coach another, you better part. Everyone in the team should work in unison. If the team is adjusted, the team leader, the coach and the doctor work with complete understanding, this is already a lot and a rarity. Then the result is possible. The next stage of the process: if a football player is successful, if there is a result, the player must be sold. If you do not do this on time, he may begin to play with a different mood. A good young player must take his place in the team. Now we argue further: in order to identify young talents, it is good to have the main team, an understudy team and another subsidiary club. In one country I can’t have them, so I acquired several clubs in different countries; besides Lithuania it is Scotland and Belarus.

- That is, first of all, football is your favorite pastime?

- Of course. Like any person, I want to enjoy what I do. I want to create a club that breaks away from others. So far, alas, it doesn’t work out. But I began to delve into the details and think that I now know the problems that prevent Harts from achieving the desired result. I want to overcome them.

- Is it possible to consider Hearts as a subsidiary of Kaunas or Kaunas as Hearts?

- No, they are both self-sufficient organisms, and each task is to win at its own level. I can’t buy Maradona for the Lithuanian championship, and this is not necessary at all. But if Maradona (I mean a very talented player) appears in the team, he should play a maximum of a year in Kaunas, and then go on promotion, for example, in the English league. That's what I say to young players: if you can show yourself, then in a year you will already be at Hearts. And they play great both in Lithuania and in Scotland. For example, Wieliczka has already played 80 games for Harts without a break.

- And you are not accused of protectionism: they say a man came from Lithuania and drags his own instead of letting the locals play?

- Even if I didn’t do anything, a flurry of accusations from Scottish journalists would have poured on me. The main thing in Russian journalism is news and information. One way or another, but this principle persists. In Britain, all this died long ago, there the basis was advertising. That is, information is presented in a certain volume and form of the point of view of interested parties. And here I come and say “move in” - in a situation where the market has long been divided. They want to push me in every possible way, and here all the ways are already good.

- Therefore, in Scotland there is a closed football community in which you are not allowed. When the Hearts made real competition to the usual championship leaders last season, then the persecution started?

- No, it started earlier, almost from the first steps. And when the Hearts won 11 games in a row, an open fight began with us. In Russia and Lithuania, agents are not working as closely with players as they are in the West. In Scotland, agents sometimes dictate policies to the coach: which players to bet, which ones not, who to sell. The fate of the clubs and the whole championship, in fact, is in the hands of agents. At Hearts, I stopped this practice. I created a headquarters in which the main thing is not knowledge, but devotion. I had to get rid of many. In our country, the chairman of the board of directors was a lord from parliament - he received his resignation. He commented as the press needed it; and the press is based in Glasgow, and they wrote about us in the interests of Glasgow.

- You can say that now you are standing firmly on your feet?

- My position can be compared with the position of a person who received a blow to the head with reinforcement the day before. Today, firstly, he didn’t get on the head, and secondly, he became more experienced and cautious. At the same time, no one knows what will happen tomorrow, including him.

- In Scotland, a totalitarian system has recently developed: Glasgow Rangers and Celtic all win and for decades have not allowed others to win titles. Is the opposition to the clubs from Glasgow doomed?

- Before my appearance, third place was the maximum that other clubs could count on. I managed to move something off the ground. Thirteen-year practice in Lithuanian football helped me. In Scotland, in my opinion, people are more primitive and brazen. Initially, I panicked, but then I began to anticipate my enemies. I bought a Chilean, and the agents processed it in two accounts, and he left, then the captain and five other players recruited to Glasgow left me. The team began chaos. I stepped aside. He began the funded period, made a bet on the very young.

“ You say agents are the main evil?”

- Not only agents, the whole system is against us, including the judges. The judges not only take money, but also root for the Rangers or Celtic, and it’s impossible to deal with it. And the reason is clear: half of the newspaper space is given to football. Politics, business and culture have a much smaller share. Colossal money is made on football. Two clubs are enough to fight, and the fact that this is not a sports fight, but show business, does not bother anyone. As a result, both the Rangers and the Celtic are degrading.

- Is it true that Spartak was interested in Harts goalkeeper Gordon?

- We have a normal relationship with Spartak. However, today Gordon is the best goalkeeper in Scotland, and I do not want to sell him for nothing. He is 23 years old, he perfectly defended the year at the gates of Harts, I determined its price - 12 million - and I’m not going to give it for less money. Spartak is thinking. Gordon, by the way, is constantly fooled here in Scotland, and, as always, they act primitively and brazenly. It got to the point that they came to me with an offer to sell it for 2 million euros. So long as such a difficult situation around the guy developed, he even had to be removed from the games and added to the transfer list with a price of 12 million, that is, in fact, hidden. I do not want to mentally injure him, let the situation calm down a bit. As for the Russian version, to be honest, I would not want to. In Russia, players work in a different mode, and we do not buy anyone there and do not return the Lithuanians sold to Russia to ourselves.

- Anatoly Fedorovich Byshovets, now the current coach of the Russian Premier League, worked for you. What do you think of him? How did you meet?

“I advertised that Harts needs a new coach.” I generally practice this way of finding the people I need. He came to me with an offer. I am cautious about the candidatures of great coaches, since when creating a club you need to do a lot of black work. I mainly used him not as a coach, but as a consultant - so that he looked and expressed his opinion about what kind of football the team plays and whether it is possible to change something. Do I need to leave the Scottish players or do I need to completely change them - I'm not strong in this area, I'm not a football player, but the organizer. In the end, he came to his own conclusion: figuratively speaking, it is necessary to create a field camp somewhere in Ulan-Ude - with a guard in the doorway that monitors who has come and who has gone, where, why and to whom, and then everything will work out. Otherwise, everything is useless. A trainer arrives, and the agents are already starting to negotiate on how to sell it. I’m looking for a coach and player all the time. I need a certain ideal, and, apparently, this is an endless process.

- How important is the youth school for Harts, how does the football academy work?

- This is the strategically necessary rear of the team in conditions of martial law. With many young players I signed a contract for five years. The director of the academy is horrified: how are we going to sell nobody? But this is a necessary measure. If a footballer signed a contract for five years, this does not mean that it cannot be sold, just agents do not stir up his head. Now it’s easier for me to pay for the extra two years than to have people on the team who are constantly looking to the side. I now have 11 guys on the team in the 87-88th year - they are all players of the Scottish youth team. And this is my rear.

- Why didn’t Malofeev succeed?

“He did it very well.”

- But he spent only ten matches and left.

- The conflict in the team began even before Malofeev. Valdas Ivanauskas has already found himself in a deadlock when five players do not play with the captain, but only dream of a striped Celtic T-shirt.

- How to make it so that the Harts footballer does not dream of a Celtic or Rangers T-shirt?

- I believe that there is nothing wrong with these dreams. It's just that everything should be honest without different underground games. For example, the story of Hartley. One English club wanted to buy it for 3.5 million, but I did not sell it, because he honestly admitted that he dreamed of Celtic. He did not play the most important game against Celtic, honestly admitting that he could not. We played without a middle, it was very difficult. As a result, now I give it for a million to Celtic, but I do not regret it, because he behaved openly and with dignity.

- How significant is the Commonwealth Cup for your Kaunas? Many talk about the devaluation of the tournament.

- It is not clear to me why a similarly similar tournament is being held in Israel in parallel. To break up the Commonwealth Cup completely? If so, then who needs it? It would be possible if the game in the hall in Moscow does not suit someone, to combine efforts, call all the teams to Israel, and make a decent prize pool. For example, I could also participate.

- What are you happy to devote your time to besides football?

- Perhaps poems and various intellectual programs. There are practically no intellectuals on European television, there are only shows and information left. In Russia, intelligence is still present in many programs, but perhaps for the time being. This process will overwhelm us. As for poetry, it’s from the heart. I have poems about Scotland, about Russia and even about good and bad journalists. Here's a story: in my youth I served on a K-19 submarine, and when I spoke about this in Scotland, one journalist wrote that I was crazy, on the grounds that K-19 drowned and the whole crew died. Then I promised to buy a boat and bring it to show them. Unfortunately, it turned out that the boat was no longer there, only one cabin remained.