If there’s one man on Earth whom you never, ever want to cross, it’s Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
So, imagine how Dutch soccer superstar Ruud Gullit, the recently anointed £4 million a year coach of Grozny’s provincial soccer team, felt after receiving this little memo from the man who, whenever he even hears the word ‘human rights group’, simply ” smiles, puts a knife in his mouth and bites down on it”:
For today, head of the republic Ramzan Kadyrov is extremely disappointed with Ruud Gullit’s approach to his duties, as instead of working with his sleeves rolled up, considering the team’s tournament position, he has bars and discos on his mind.
Considering the above, Ramzan Kadyrov sets the task for Ruud Gullit to get three points from the next away game in Perm. Otherwise, Gullit will be dismissed from the head coach position.”
Of course, Gullit is not the first coach of a Russian team to fall foul of a Caucasus strongman: the great Nikolai Starostin was sent to the Gulag because his Spatak team kept beating Dynamo, whose patron was Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenty Beria (Starostin got off lightly with just a decade of forced labour in Siberia).
Only last week, Gullit was wolfing down free sushi and waxing lyrical about the big adventure (and even bigger money!) that drew him to Grozny.
He complained of how no-one paid any attention to him in the US where he coached the LA Galaxy.
But if he doesn’t deliver a win tonight, he will be wishing for some anonymity.
Not that living in hiding helped the last person who “disappointed” Kadyrov…
As Tatiana Kasatkina, the Moscow-based executive director of Memorial, a Russian human rights group that has been active in Chechnya for years, is quoted in Megan Stack’s excellent piece:
“These are people who fought in the mountains, they are rebels and their arms are soaked in blood up to their elbows. Their code is, if you go against us or you go against Kadyrov, you’ll be exterminated.”
Of course, no-one is suggesting that Gullit is in any physical danger; however, he should probably avoid the sauna, just in case.
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On the other hand, Russian corruption has doubled in the last decade, making it the “world’s most corrupt major economy”. So, should Terek lose tonight, at least Gullit has a higher than average chance of bribing his way to safety.