WHEN SECRET BECOMES EXPLICIT Last week of October. Middle of a day. Pini Zahavi comes to a meeting at Les Ambassadeurs - a private club and casino in Mayfair, one of the most respectable areas of London. In a club restaurant, he has a business conversation with Anglo-Iranian businessman Kia Jurabchian, who is about to acquire West Ham. On the table are mobile phones, filofaxes, diaries and a tray with Belgian chocolates. Pini Zahavi is the first and only football super agent. Business partners smoke rounded Cuban cigars, discussing the reasons for the prolonged process of a change of power at the “hammers”. Along the way, Zahavi receives calls on both mobile phones, easily jumping from his native Hebrew to Portuguese, German and English, discusses future trips and deals. “If they give away 15 million euros for a guy from River Plate, then maybe. But the price is rising, ”he warns the interlocutor, and then, with a smile on his lips, sets out a short biography of a young Argentine football player. Jurabchian, meanwhile, mentions the president of Benfica and asks how many seats Zahavi needs for the Champions League match between Arsenal and CSKA, which will take place the other day. Despite the common belief that financial transactions in football are transparent and are a secret for the family seals, these two behave at ease, if not blithely. For all the time that I spent with them, Zahavi was polite, cheerful and sincere. When Brazilian striker Carlos Alberto appears on the threshold, having won the Champions League with Porto under the leadership of Jose Mourinho, Zahavi asks him to wait until we finish the conversation.
Why he agreed to give his first large-scale interview to our magazine explains simply: “I liked your voice over the phone. That's how I judge people. A fisherman sees a fisherman from afar - I used to be a journalist too. ”FROM THE JOURNALIST TO THE MEDIA MAGNATO November 1981. Belfast. Israeli team is preparing for the qualifying match of the World Cup against Northern Ireland. Zahawi, while a sports journalist from Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest newspaper, sits on the bed of his hotel room and smokes a cigar in a fitting setting. With him in the room is Yossi Melman, who also came to cover the game, but as the London correspondent of Ha'aretz, the Israeli broadband. “Yossi,” Zahavi addresses him. “I want you to learn something. Learn from me: every four or five years I change newspapers. ” Before going to Yedioth at the age of 36, Zahavi worked in the sports publication Hadashot Hasport, which he left after the 1974 World Cup in Germany. After the Belfast parting words, his colleague worked for Yedioth for another four years, then moved to another newspaper called simply Hadashot. The career of a journalist ended in 1988. Melman recalls a lesson 25 years ago. “Hadashot Hasport was very popular in Israel. Pini told me: “Yossi, if you move from one place to another, you get compensation and a higher salary.” And then I asked: “Are you interested in making money?” He looked at me in surprise: “Of course. I’m not going to remain a poor sports correspondent all my life! ”And he laughed ...” Since then, Zahavi has made a fortune. One of his close business partners believes that he has more than enough money - at least 65 million pounds to “allow himself to retire, continuing to live in great comfort. But he loves work. ”Pini Zahavi is an excellent football assistant. This is a person who can initiate, negotiate and conclude any transaction for a football player, as well as for a club or agent. And it doesn’t matter - large or small. He probably has the most useful circle of football acquaintances. “Yes, I have very great connections,” he smiles. “Because I have never let anyone down in the world. And what I do, I do honestly, without any tricks. I speak as in spirit. ”Zahavi's career ascent coincided with the transformation of football into a global phenomenon of our time. The wealth and influence of sport # 1 is growing thanks to an increase in the composition of the participants in the World Cup and the creation of the Champions League, and a sharp jump in revenue from television and sponsors transformed the national championships; He also made the English Premier League the richest in the world. Zahavi was involved in some of the most high-profile events in English football in recent years. Such as the transfer of Rio Ferdinand from Leeds to Manchester United in 2002, costing the Red Devils £ 30 million, and secret negotiations with Chelsea with Sven-Eran Ericsson in July 2003 and Ashley Cole in January 2005. Ferdinand went to the camp of the most hated enemy, which infuriated Leeds fans. Ericsson, despite being the coach of the English national team, allowed Chelsea to court himself, meeting with the new owner of the “blue” Roman Abramovich. And the left-back of the Three Lions team forbade the contract with Arsenal to negotiate with other clubs, but he met with Jose Mourinho and Chelsea Executive Director Peter Kenyon. However, no matter what happens, Zahavi always went dry of water. As an agent, he is registered in Israel, therefore, is not subject to the jurisdiction of the English Football Association. While Kenyon, Jonathan Barnett (Agent Cole), Mourinho, and Chelsea were subjected to disciplinary sanctions after their meeting was publicized, the FA and the Premier League were unable to dig into Zahavi. However, in order to prevent such incidents, the FA has already redone its statutes as necessary and asked FIFA to investigate Zahavi’s involvement in the incident. Recently, Zahavi, whose friends include Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Knesset speaker and possibly future president Country Reuven Rivlin, diversified its interests. Together with Eli Azur, the owner of several Russian-language newspapers in Israel, they are the owners of the Charlton media concern, which owns the rights to display the matches of the English Premier League and the national elite division in Israel. True, the popularity of Zahavi in the homeland has fallen. After the last World Cup was broadcast only on paid television channels. 2003 ZAHAVI facilitated the arrival of Roman Abramovich to Chelsea. Two years earlier, a mutual friend introduced him to the governor of Chukotka in Moscow, and Zahavi cemented his friendship by inviting a billionaire to a Champions League match between Manchester United and Real Madrid in April 2003, two months before the purchase of Chelsea. Zahavi generally played a key role in concluding this deal. He also contributed to the influx of new players who immediately started arriving at Stamford Bridge. Of the 111 million pounds spent by the club on summer 2003 breeding, the agent accounted for five. The appearance of Abramovich on foggy Albion led to accusations that his utter wealth (total Chelsea transfer expenses with him amounted to 441.5 million pounds) unbalanced English and European football. In January of this year, Zahavi helped Alexander Gaydamak buy Portsmouth . Alexander is the son of Arkady Gaydamak, an exiled oligarch who was born in now independent Ukraine and is the owner of the Jerusalem Beitar. In August, Zahavi introduced England to a new football reality where players are owned by third parties, not clubs. As a result of a sensational deal in West Ham, football players from Argentina's national team Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano were. The transition was facilitated by Media Sports Investment, a concern that was previously led by Jurabchian and for which Zahavi works as an intermediary. “For South America, commercial companies that own players have been standard practice for more than a quarter of a century,” he told me. It will become such here if English football faces a problem of survival. ”Zahavi is the only consultant to the Football Heroes Foundation established last summer. Its members include former referee of the English Premier League David Ellery and royal attorney David Griffith-Jones, specializing in sports law. The purpose of the Fund is to raise 100 million pounds from private sources to acquire commercial rights to football players. This, according to Zahavi, is one of the many typical financial schemes in which he is involved, and MSI is the most famous of them. In 2004, she actually leased the Brazilian Corinthians for 10 years, having bought a controlling stake and paid £ 23 million for moving to São Paulo Tevez and Mascherano to their Argentinean clubs Boke Juniors and River Plate. The rights to Tevez and Mascherano belong to MSI (100 and 50 percent respectively; the other half of the rights to Mascherano are owned by the Brazilian television company Globo). Despite some successes in the new team, they have not taken root in Brazil and now defend the colors of West Ham, where they also have difficulties, but of a game quality. What are the advantages of football players when third parties control their rights? One of the businessmen, who knows firsthand the circumstances of Tevez and Mascherano’s move to the Boleyn Ground, believes that “the players do not care who owns them - a club, private individual or company - as long as they are taken care of." Tevez from Boca to Corinthians was mediated by Argentinean agent Fernando Hidalgo, a Zahavi partner for their joint venture, HAZ Sports, based in Buenos Aires. It is assumed that the services of an agent for arranging transfers of Tevez and Mascherano cost the club from east London no less than 5 million pounds. But the deal provides for a clause according to which West Ham is obliged to sell players if they receive an offer within five years. If West Ham wants to keep the Argentines, he will have to pay 40 million pounds. This is the so-called purchase option, as opposed to the more common contractual clause on the sale, according to which the player must be sold if the transfer price is agreed. Zahavi is not a shareholder of MSI; Apparently, the company is owned by Badri Patarkatsishvili, the Georgian billionaire and the owner of Tbilisi Dynamo, who is supported by the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who is now living in London. In the deal to transfer Argentines to West Ham, Zahavi acted as an agent for the “hammers” and, as in the case of Chelsea’s purchase by Abramovich, he will be rewarded for his work. Finishing - tomorrow Transfer of Andrei KARNAUKHOV