Soviets Accept Aid From Corporate America : Soccer: Sports official says team doesn’t want to be dependent on government.

Less than 24 hours after arriving on an all-day flight from Rome, the normally affable coach of the Soviet Union’s national soccer team was running low on energy and good cheer. Appearing as if the last place he wanted to be was at a press conference outside the Convention Center’s Yorty Hall, Valeri Lobonovsky kept fidgeting and looking at his watch.

Considering that he has been national team coach since 1986, it wasn’t that he’s unaccustomed to news conferences. It’s just that he’s never been to one at which the principle interrogator was from the Footwear News.

At least she didn’t ask him about his team’s loss to the Netherlands in the final of the 1988 European Championships.

She did, however, ask him about the shoes that his team will wear in coming games, such as the one today at Stanford against the United States. She wanted to know if they will be manufactured by the same company, Nicole Footwear, that he was advertising on the pocket of his double-breasted, navy blue blazer.

Lobonovsky didn’t know what he was supposed to say. He fidgeted and looked at his watch.

The president of the Consolidated Shoe Co., of which Nicole Footwear is a subsidiary, came to his rescue. Dick Carrington IV of Lynchburg, Va., who had arranged the news conference in conjunction with the Western Shoe Assn.’s International Buying Market, explained that it would be impossible for the Soviets to wear his company’s shoes on the field because Nicole Footwear doesn’t manufacture athletic shoes. Its specialty is inexpensive fashion footwear for women.

Whenever Soviet soccer officials, coaches and players appear this year at public functions, Carrington said, they are under contract to wear the blue blazers and gray slacks provided by Nicole. Taco Bell paid for a Soviet baseball team’s tour of the United States last year, but this is the first time a U.S. company has been an official sponsor of a Soviet team.

“This is an opportunity for us to get exposure in Russia,” Carrington said. “Soccer is the most important sport over there. When people in Russia see their team on television at the World Cup in Italy, arriving at the airport or at press conferences or other occasions, they’re going to see them wearing blazers that say Nicole Footwear. That’s going to give us an identity over there and help us become the first Americans to sell shoes in Russia.”

So this is what glasnost has wrought.

On Jan. 1, 1988, as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic reforms, Soviet sports federations were informed that they could no longer feed at the public trough, that they would have to become financially independent of the government.

That wasn’t as shocking to the federations as it might have seemed because they have always received less money from the government than they have paid back in taxes. Their operating budgets were supplemented by membership fees, lotteries and the sale of tickets, souvenirs and publications. But faced with being cut off entirely by the government, the federations had to begin thinking bigger.

As a result, Soviet sport is speeding down the path toward commercialism. Ironically, when the Soviets boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics, one of the reasons they gave was the over-commercialism. Now they openly embrace the idea of making money.

“Don’t think they weren’t always commercially minded,” said Clive Toye, president of the Mundial Sports Group, which brought the Soviets to Los Angeles this week for two games in the Marlboro Cup. “They were always interested in Western currency. But it was as if it was a necessary evil.

“Now, they’re looking for financial opportunities the way everyone else is.”

Adidas has a long-term arrangement with the government sports agency, Goskomsport, to sponsor Soviet teams. But for the first time, a Soviet national team played in uniforms with advertising logos besides those belonging to Adidas at last year’s ice hockey World Championships. At the gymnastics World Championships, the Soviets wore uniforms advertising a Belgian aircraft company.

Sam Gandler, vice president of a Great Neck (N.Y.) sports marketing company, USA Sports Communication, Inc., said that soccer is the best buy because of the worldwide attention the team will receive at this summer’s World Cup in Italy. A cumulative audience of 12.8 billion television viewers watched the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.

“If a company wants to do something in the Soviet Union, the best way is to get involved with the national soccer team,” said Gandler, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet republic of Moldavia. “There are 40 million people registered to play soccer in the Soviet Union, and almost everyone is a fan.”

Gandler’s brother, Ilya, is a sales representative for the Consolidated Shoe Co., which is how Nicole Footwear became associated with the Soviet soccer team. Sam Gandler would not reveal the terms of the agreement.

“As far as I understand, it’s unlawful to give you the figures,” he said.

The vice president of the Soviet soccer federation, Nikita Simonian, insisted that there are no figures.

“No money was involved,” he said at the press conference. “We consider it like presents from Nicole Footwear.”

That, no doubt, is how the agreement also will be reported to Goskomsport, which still receives a substantial percentage of the federation’s income. But that could change next month, when the government is expected to give the federations their independence from Goskomsport.

Displaying post- glasnost candor, Simonian, a Soviet soccer hero in the ‘50s and ‘60s, said he is eager for that day to arrive.

“We don’t want to be dependent on a government bureaucracy that doesn’t understand our sport,” he said.

Accepting the inevitable, Goskomsport no longers interferes with the soccer federation’s plans. Simonian said the federation was allowed to make the arrangements for the national team’s trip to California.

“Negotiations with the Soviets in the past were formal and convoluted, and the responses were an awful long time in coming,” Toye said. “But this time it was pretty straightforward. We always dealt with the federation in the past, but you knew the decisions were being made by layers and layers of bureaucracy.”

Besides having the freedom to make independent judgments, Simonian seemed equally proud that the federation soon will have its own bank account.

He said Goskomsport took all of the money that the Soviet Union earned for playing in the 1986 World Cup. Of the $1.4 million the Soviets are guaranteed for playing in the 1990 World Cup, he said the federation will retain most of it.

The federation will also share in the transfer fees that foreign teams pay for Soviet soccer players. Basketball and hockey players recently were allowed to sign with teams outside the Soviet Union, but the practice started with soccer players in 1988. The famous Italian team, Juventus of Turin, paid $4 million for midfielder Alexander Zavarov.

Of that, 40% went to Goskomsport, 40% to Zavarov’s team and 20% to the government for taxes. The federation received nothing. In the future, Simonian said, the federation should receive the 40% that now goes to Goskomsport.

That will be debated because Goskomsport officials fear the federation will not use its money for grass-roots development of soccer players. The federation contributed to that fear recently by taking the first three divisions of the professional league under its wing and leaving the three lower divisions to fend for themselves.

Goskomsport officials also have expressed concern that the federation will become so enamored of Western dollars that it will allow the majority of its stars to be sold to foreign teams, leaving fans in the Soviet Union with a second-rate league. A rule allowing athletes to leave the country only after their 28th birthdays has been rescinded.

“When all this stuff began, everyone was in favor,” said Vladimir Gheskin, deputy editor in chief of the Soviet sports newspaper, Sovietsky Sport.

“Now, there are some questions. With all the best guys playing abroad, who will we see? We must be careful in all these transfers because we must also think about the Soviet spectator.”

The Soviets might also have to think more about their athletes. Regardless of the amount of the transfer fee, Soviet soccer players under contract to foreign teams last year received $1,300 a month, about the same amount as earned by mid-level diplomats.

Last June, to aid them in their demands for more money, Soviet soccer players and coaches formed a union. There, however, is believed to be no truth to the rumor that Don Fehr is learning Russian.