Ruble knocks out a new victim: footballers

Currency swings have increased Russian clubs’ wage costs by almost 40 percent. Slovak players will not be affected, as they are paid in euros.

The highest-paid player in the Russian football league, Brazilian Hulk, earns €7 million a year. At the start of the year, Zenit St Petersburg was paying him 26 million rubles a month. However, the fall of the Russian currency has increased his wage costs by almost 40 percent. At today’s exchange rate, his monthly salary now exceeds 42 million rubles. And Hulk is just one of many expensive foreign players whose contracts create problems for Russian clubs when the exchange rate shifts. “It can be expected that club budgets for next season will be lower. I also have information that there will be a greater tendency to negotiate contracts in rubles,” Slovak football agent Jozef Tokos told the Economic Daily.

Slovaks are calm
Four Slovak footballers currently play in Russia’s Premier League, and in the second tier there is also national team goalkeeper Jan Mucha. We asked them whether exchange rate changes had affected their pay. “Personally, I don’t feel any impact – I’m paid in euros. But the fact is that in this situation the club will be paying more for me,” said national team defender Jan Durica, a Lokomotiv Moscow player. Because of the league’s winter break, he has been in Slovakia for two weeks and did not directly experience last week’s steep ruble drop. Still, he noticed the impact. “For example, air tickets have become much more expensive. I’m at home now, but at the start of the year we have training camps, and I’ll return to Russia only in March. I hope things return to normal by then,” Durica said.

For Tokos, who also negotiated Mucha’s contract in Russia, one of the key conditions was that the salary be paid in euros. “Without that, we wouldn’t have signed the deal last summer. We already saw the ruble as a risk, and like most foreign players, we fixed the contract in euros,” noted Tokos. In the Russian-owned cycling team Tinkoff-Saxo, Slovakia’s top cyclist Peter Sagan is also on the payroll, but according to our information, the ruble’s fall will not affect either riders’ salaries or the team’s operations.

The risk of losing the most expensive players
The falling ruble could cause even greater problems for the owners of leading Russian football clubs, particularly Zenit St Petersburg and Dynamo Moscow. According to sports.ru, the ten highest-paid players in Russia earn €47.5 million annually. In euro terms, this was worth 1.8 billion rubles in the summer, but after the latest drop, their salaries are now worth around 3.5 billion rubles. “It is an indisputable fact that for owners, players are now about 40 percent more expensive than when they signed their contracts,” assessed Tokos.

And in just ten days, Europe’s winter transfer window opens. With the worsening situation in Russia and rising costs for owners, there is a risk that the top league could lose some star players. “It can be expected that expensive players will want to leave. On the other hand, Russian clubs offered salaries that, in many cases, were hard to match even for top leagues in Western Europe,” said the Slovak agent. Durica does not believe that, upon returning to Lokomotiv Moscow after the New Year, he will face a sale or wage cut. “Every player will wait and see how things develop. In my opinion, clubs have detailed information about how the country’s economy will perform in the near future. They will act accordingly,” Durica added.