Money may have been key to the striker's move but how he fares in Russia will influence how other players view the league
"Samuel Eto'o completed his �20m move to Anzhi Makhachkala on Wednesday." It's a sentence that feels odd, even in the inflated, globalised world of modern football. Eto'o, still one of the best forwards in the world, going to Dagestan, somewhere most western Europeans have heard of, if they've heard of it at all, only for what a Moscow official euphemistically termed "low-level Islamic insurgency".
Previously, Russia has provided a home for up-and-coming players from South America and Africa, the fabled stepping-stone into the big leagues of western Europe, and for those on the way down. Occasionally, as when Maniche and Costinha joined the Portuguese influx at Dynamo Moscow, it seems Russian football is about to join the mainstream. The Portuguese experiment at Dynamo didn't work, though, and the recognised players in their late 20s left and life went on much as before.
When Anzhi started collecting assorted Brazilians ? Jucilei, Diego Tardelli and Roberto Carlos, all former internationals ? it seemed like another club with more money than sense seduced by samba mystique, just as when Arsenal Tula sent the Ukrainian coach Yevhen Kucherevskyi to Brazil to sign five players, then bought five more just to be on the safe side. Players bought off the shelf for their ready exoticism and the cachet of being Brazilian rarely succeed.
But this is something else. When it was suggested Manchester City and Internazionale might swap Eto'o for Carlos Tevez, it seemed perfectly rational; Eto'o might be 30 and might not be quite the player he was two years ago, but he is still one of the world's best forwards. At Anzhi, he will become, when the stage of his career is taken into account, by a huge margin the biggest-name foreigner ever to play in the Russian league.
Whenever billionaire owners start spending freely, fans of other clubs taunt them for their lack of history. Anzhi has less than most. The club were founded in 1991, reached the Premier League in 1999 and was relegated three years later, only returning to the top flight in 2009. Last season they finished eleventh; after Sunday's 2-1 over Dynamo, they are up to fourth, but 3-0 defeats at CSKA Moscow and Spartak Moscow and a general inconsistency of performance has suggested that they are about at the limits of their potential with the spending so far. So their owner, Suleiman Kerimov, wants to spend more.
Anzhi, though, don't just lack history; they also lack geography. Although the team plays home matches in Makhachkala, a city with a population of around 600,000 on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, their players live and train in the Moscow region. An away game against CSKA or Spartak thus involves a journey of around 1,000 miles less than a home fixture.
Of course, the long-term effect of the transfer depends to a large extent on how successful Eto'o is. He is a highly intelligent player, his movement probably as good as any forward in the game. I once went to his room in a Cairo hotel to interview him during the African Cup of Nations and found him watching football on a local television channel. I asked who he was watching and he replied that he didn't know; he just liked watching any football to study the shapes and learn where the spaces were against different types of opposition. Assuming that, five years on, his preparation remains as assiduous, he is as mentally well-equipped to cope with a move to a new football culture as anybody.
Anzhi themselves have tended to play either 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1 this season (with Roberto Carlos usually employed as a holding midfielder, the waning of his pace having made impossible his surges from full-back). Eto'o naturally fits into either system, whether as a centre-forward or wide, and similarly Alexander Prudnikov, the much-travelled 22-year-old forward could move wide if required. When Eto'o has been ineffective for Cameroon, it tends to have been when he has dropped deep in search of the ball, only to find a lack of passing options; at Anzhi, with the likes of Roberto Carlos, the former Chelsea midfielder Yuri Zhirkov, the former PSV midfielder Balazs Dzsudzsak and the Moroccan Mbark Boussoufa, there should be enough quality to allow him to play as an out-and-out front man.
There are other issues, though. Having been used to playing home games at the Camp Nou and San Siro, the 20,000-capacity Dinamo Stadium in Makhachkala represents quite a step down. And then there is racism (not that Eto'o did not suffer that in Spain). It would be wrong to portray every Russian crowd as snarling right-wing, banana throwers, but it would equally be inaccurate to suggest that racism is not an issue, as Roberto Carlos found in an away game at Krylya Sovetov when bananas were thrown and he was subjected to monkey-chants.
The difference ? in terms of whether Eto'o is a success ? may not even be whether the racism is more widespread or more virulent than in Spain, but how at home he feels. He lived in Spain from the age of 16: it is presumably easier to ignore abuse in an environment in which you feel safe and secure. If he finds it hard to settle in Moscow, then hostile fans are only going to make things worse. And hostility is likely purely because he plays for Anzhi. Zhirkov was reportedly left in tears after being booed during Russia's friendly against Serbia this month, apparently perceived by ultra-nationalist fans as having betrayed Russia by joining a club from the Caucasus. Then again, there are suggestions that Eto'o will continue to live in Milan and fly to Russia for games aboard Kerimov's private jet.
The irony of that is that Kerimov's motives in buying the club are to tackle precisely that kind of prejudice. With a fortune of around �4.7bn, according to Forbes, he is ranked as the 118th richest man in the world, and had invested around �80m in the club this year even before the Eto'o deal. The question, as always, is why? Perhaps it is merely local pride; after all, Kerimov was born in Derbent in Dagestan, and studied accounting and economics at Dagestan State University.
But it's hard when discussing oligarchs not to start joining the dots. In late 1999, Kerimov formed a business alliance with Roman Abramovich and Oleg Deripaska. The three became notorious for their aggressive takeovers. Abramovich, of course, as well as buying Chelsea, funds the Russian state youth academy at Togliatti, as well as contributing to funds to pay for the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2018 World Cup. Deripaska, who has been linked with takeovers of Arsenal and West Bromwich, was a part-owner of Kuban Krasnodar until 2008.
It's a fairly open secret that oligarchs are encouraged by Vladimir Putin to invest in sporting ventures. Kerimov may be a diehard Anzhi fan, but it seems just as likely that he was advised to invest. After all, if Anzhi do well, it 'normalises' the situation in Dagestan, just as Terek Grozny's ongoing presence in the top flight supposedly makes Chechnya a more palatable place. Decentralisation, reaching out to the regions, has been a cornerstone of Putin's policy in all spheres (its success in football is seen in the fact that none of the last four champions have been from Moscow).
The issue of funding is a tricky one. Moscow pumps millions of pounds each year into developing the Caucasian region. If some of that money ends up being used to fund football clubs, it's little wonder that fans from Moscow feel aggrieved: why should their taxes indirectly subsidise Eto'o's wages? Kerimov, after all, didn't buy Anzhi; rather he was given it by the president of Dagestan, Magomedsalam Magomedov, in exchange for a promise of �120m of investment in infrastructure, including a new 40,000-capacity stadium.
Eto'o, presumably, has agreed to the move because of the extraordinary wages on offer ? around �9m a year plus bonuses ? but the situation he's walking into is far more complicated than scoring goals or collecting a pay cheque. At the same time, while fans of other Russian clubs may resent the money Anzhi are spending, if Eto'o is a success it would make it far more likely that other players of his stature would consider Russia as a viable destination.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/aug/25/samuel-etoo-anzhi-makhachkala
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