Belarusian football had a rare spell of global exposure during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Fast forward to 2024 and the domestic game seems to be in poor shape. The reasons behind this clear decline are complex, but at the core is political interference and mismanagement.

 

Jon Blackwood, Associate Professor, Robert Gordon University

 

Belarusian football had a rare spell of global exposure during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Uniquely in Europe, authoritarian leader Aliaksandr Lukashenka ordered sport to continue without interruption, as part of his regime’s sclerotic and spectacularly misguided response to the pandemic. To the horror of Europe’s footballing authorities, the Belarusian football league completed a full season in 2020, with a global audience of football supporters following from around the world on YouTube, as restrictions on movement and public gatherings prevented fans from following the sport in their home countries.

Fast forward to 2024 and the domestic game seems to be in poor shape. In the 2010s the Belarusian league, if not widely followed, was well-respected; clearly better than the neighbouring Baltic State competitions, if not quite as good as the championship in Poland. The serial champions from that time, BATE Borisov, scored successes against Arsenal and Everton in European competitions.

Ten years later, the standards of play are now probably lower than those in neighbouring Lithuania, with the top Polish league, the Ekstraklasa, in a different universe, in financial and sporting terms, to the contemporary Belarusian Vysheyshaya Liga.

 

Political football

The reasons behind this clear decline are complex, but at the core is political interference and mismanagement. As with every other sphere of cultural, social and economic activity in Belarus, football is funded and shaped ideologically by the state. Football historians would recognise much of the Soviet-era footballing infrastructure as remaining largely intact.

Private football clubs are a rarity and regarded with great suspicion by the authorities, with the vast majority of clubs receiving funding through state bodies or state-owned enterprises. Dynamo Minsk, the 2023 champions, reportedly retain a close link with the Belarusian Ministry of the Interior. Torpedo-BELAZ Zhodino is funded by the mining truck concern whose name they carry; FC Minsk has a long running sponsorship arrangement with Belarus Tractors. Regional clubs such as Dynamo Brest, Gomel and Vitebsk are funded by a mixture of regional executive committees and local business concerns. The regime sets wage levels (a top Belarusian footballer earns roughly the same monthly as an average National League player in England) and terms of employment.

It will come as no surprise that the state’s support for nearly the whole infrastructure of football comes with conditions attached. As with every other sector of Belarusian culture and society, this was shaken severely during the protests of 2020. In September 2020, a group of well-known Belarusian footballers recorded a short video against the violence being meted out to those protestors apprehended by the state in the crackdown after that year’s 9 August election. This video has cast a long shadow on their subsequent fates.

Perhaps the best-known participant in this appeal was Stanislav Dragun. An international midfielder with over sixty Belarusian caps, Dragun was by then in the autumn of his career, but could have anticipated three or four more years playing at the top level in Belarus before retiring. Injured at the end of 2020, Dragun was never called up to the national team again; by 2022-23, he had prematurely retired. The regime’s “Ministry of Sports”, as documented by the football website Tribuna, had opened a blacklist of players who were not to be given contracts with domestic football clubs under any circumstances. Dragun’s last years were ruined by this: he was able to train with BATE but the club could not give him a playing contract.

 

Mixed fortunes for “repentance”

Dragun was one of around fifty names on the Ministry’s blacklist. Other players have tried to remove themselves from it by recording “repentance videos” for their publicly expressed civic position in September 2020, with mixed results. In April 2022, Aleksandar Sachivko – a veteran defender – earned himself a further year’s contract at Dynamo Minsk, after recording a lengthy repentance video allegedly scripted by regime propaganda officials. Winger Anatoly Makarov recorded a similar video released by propaganda officials of the Minsk Regional Executive Committee, but in his case, it was to no avail. He did not set foot on a football field last season with Torpedo BELAZ, and has now joined a growing Belarusian football diaspora in Russia and Kazakhstan, unable to remove his name from the list of those forbidden employment.

Footballers who took part in the 2020 protests have spent time in prison. The FC Gorodeya player Rostislav Shavel, who was in and out of prison throughout that year, and eventually released to “home chemistry” [a Soviet-era form of house arrest – Editor]; a similar fate befell former national team goalkeeper, and coach, Vasili Khomutovsky, sentenced to two years’ house arrest in December 2022. The most high-profile case was that of the sports journalist and footballer Aleksandr Ivulin, who was imprisoned for two years in Janaury 2022 under the notorious Article 342. Ivulin, who wrote for Tribuna and runs, with Yaroslav Pisarenko, the YouTube channel ChestnOK – which takes a light-hearted look at Belarusian sports – was placed on a list of extremists. Tribuna, an online portal similar to UK publications such as FourFourTwo or The Athletic, was also absurdly deemed an “extremist” publication by a Vitebsk court in August 2021.

In October 2021, the Belarusian Sports Solidarity Foundation, an organisation set up to support sports people who had suffered repression, submitted to UEFA a report documenting political interference in Belarusian football. The dossier alleged systematic political interference and allegations of match fixing at the behest of the regime, calling on UEFA to suspend Belarus immediately from international competition. UEFA and FIFA, however, have maintained a total silence on these allegations and appear, even despite the Belarusian regime’s complicity in the Russian aggression against Ukraine from February 2022, unwilling to act. Whilst Russia has been shunned from international football competitions, the Belarusian national team plays on, to the bewilderment of many observers.

 

National team: losing at home and abroad

The Belarusian national team itself is in a very difficult position. Political sanctions against the regime after the forced landing of Roman Protasevich’s passenger flight in Minsk, on 6 May 2021, has meant that Belarus has been unable to host an international match on home soil since then, with “home” fixtures variously held in Kazan, before February 2022, and in Hungary, Serbia, and Turkey. This is an unprecedented period of exile, with only Northern Ireland’s experience in the 1970s coming close; its team had to play fixtures in England during the worst days of the Troubles. Yet sympathy is in short supply. Many Belarusian citizens, chafing at the silence of athletes who have a public platform, refuse to support the national team, reckoning that if the footballers do not speak up in favour of the people, then they in turn are owed no support.

As this blog is finalised an intriguing row is playing out between Sergei Kovalchuk, the regime’s Minister of Sport, and Nikolai Shertsev, appointed in the last year to the presidency of the Belarusian Football Association (ABFF). The two officials recently appeared in a televised meeting with Lukashenka, with the dictator questioning why they appeared to be unable to get along with one another. The terrain of the dispute is arcane even for those interested in Belarusian football – it concerns the precise structure of the third and fourth tiers of the football leagues. Shertsev claims the backing of FIFA and UEFA for his proposed changes, whereas Kovalchuk’s appeal is to “the boss”. In microcosm, this personal and ideological dispute is indicative of the thorough imbuing of Belarusian sport with the regime’s politics as a whole.

Just as it is difficult to imagine the future of Belarus after the downfall of the regime, so too it is difficult to imagine the future of football in Belarus under a different political order. One assumes a future government will want to cut loose the obligation to fund professional sport from the state coffers – but that decision will fundamentally alter the face of the game in the country and spell the end for many of its best-known clubs, which are not run with commercial considerations in mind. Those in the Belarusian diaspora who hope keenly for a brighter tomorrow for the sport are beginning to turn their minds to how a post-Lukashenka football ecology might look, but, sadly, it seems like it will be quite some time before these blueprints make their way into reality.