You're reading: Dynamo Kyiv had a profitable year

The higher-ups of the capital’s favorite football club Dynamo Kyiv have surprised its fan base by announcing a 2013 full-year profit of Hr 100 million.

Club’s first vice president Vitaliy Sivkov
released the number during an interview with Futbol 1 television channel on
April 13. “Our gross income was a billion hryvnia while our expenses came to
900 million hryvnia,” Sivkov said, “so we had a positive result.”

Ukrainian football clubs are notorious for not
releasing financial statements, partly because they are mostly privately owned
entities, so they do not need to. Besides, as football remains mainly
unprofitable business in Ukraine, team owners are not very willing to disclose
their losses that could harm their business reputation.

Dynamo’s profit is a surprise because club has
not sold any major players in 2013, while company’s general sponsor since June
2013 – Bank Nadra, which is owned by the Firtash-affiliated company Centragas –
 is contributing reportedly only Hr 25
million per year.

Last year the only Dynamo player that was sold
was Andriy Bohdanov who left for Metalist, while number of other players were loaned
to different clubs or left for free agency, including Benoît Trémoulinas lent to
the French club Saint-Etienne.

This new financial openness may be the result
of signing the Union of European Football Associations’ new ‘fair play’ rules
in 2012, which states that clubs belonging to the football union can only spend
15 percent more than their incomes on upkeep. Dynamo, Shakhtar and other
Ukrainian teams regularly appear in UEFA’s tournaments.

Goal.com in September 2013 reported that UEFA
plans to examine the financials of 60 European football clubs, including
several Ukrainian clubs, to see if they had inflated their sponsorship revenues
in order to get around the new rules.

Another purpose behind Dynamo’s new openness
may be a desire to demonstrate its solvency. Dynamo President Ihor Surkis has made
efforts to publicly ensure that the team is stable since the arrest of oligarch
and major team sponsor Dmytro Firtash, who was arrested by Austrian authorities
on March 13 at the request of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to face
a range of fraud-related charges. “His [Firtash’s] companies are sponsors of
Dynamo Kyiv,” Surkis said in a March 16 interview with Futbol 1, “but that
doesn’t mean that the team is suffering financial difficulties.”

In order to avoid any guilt by association, Surkis
is quick to point out that Firtash is definitely not a shareholder of the club.
“When PrivatBank was our general sponsor, the same rumor that Ihor Kolomoisky
was a shareholder was floating about, but it wasn’t true back then either,”
Surkis said in the same interview with Futbol 1. “With the exception of a few
shares, I own the whole team.”

Dynamo Kyiv currently sits in third place in
the Ukrainian Premier League behind Shakhtar Donetsk and Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk.
 FC Shakhtar Donetsk, Ukraine’s champion
owned by country’s richest billionaire Rinat Ahmetov, on October 1 announced a
net profit of Hr 1.35 billion for the team during the 2012/2013 football season
.

Kyiv
Post business journalist Evan Ostryzniuk can be reached at
[email protected].