“We should have known that for Putin, Gazprom was more than a company that pumped up gas,” says Russia expert Hubert Smeets. But the love of money is blind.
When Gazprom became the main sponsor of the Champions League in the 2012/2013 football season, I had a strange feeling. It had less to do with that slightly too cozy animation in which a Gazprom employee looks out and sees the Northern Lights, which then change into the logo of the natural gas company, or the musical accompaniment – a brutal beating of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto. No, my resistance stemmed from the fact that Gazprom was unmistakably linked to Russia, which already then was not exactly at the forefront of human rights. Moreover, why would a Russian natural gas company sponsor the Champions League? What do they gain with that?
The answer to those questions was never quite clear to me, until the broadcast of Argos Media Logic from Sunday evening. In it, the research program focused on Gazprom, the state gas company that now financially supports the Russian war in Ukraine. In 2006, Gazprom became the main sponsor of the German football club Schalke 04, a deal worth 20 million euros per year. The contract was signed during a state visit by Putin to Germany, during which the Russian president was not only present, but also posed with the shirt of Schalke 04. “Some people had reservations,” said a leading supporter on the broadcast, “but most did thought it was a good sponsorship deal.’ With the new millions, sporting success lay ahead. Russia, meanwhile, had other interests. ‘Gazprom was of the greatest strategic importance for Russia’, explained journalist and Russia expert Hubert Smeets. “We should have known that for Putin, Gazprom was more than a commercial company that pumped up gas and sold it on.”
But the love of money made me blind. Chris Woerts expressed it beautifully in the broadcast. As a former director of Feyenoord, he tried to link Gazprom to the club as a sponsor. This was long before the conflict with Ukraine came to an end, but his comment was nonetheless telling: ‘Anyone who pays the right price will wear Feyenoord’s shirt.’ Feyenoord was ultimately never sponsored by Gazprom, but in 2012, the gas company caught the biggest fish of all: the UEFA Champions League. It turned out to be an ideal way for Gazprom (and thus Russia) to gain access to the most influential people from Europe. In addition, by committing to the most important football tournament in the world, Gazprom worked positively on its image. It also did so by sponsoring a major amusement park in Germany, including a roller coaster based on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
The stark contrast between, on the one hand, the souls that were won and the souls that were lost, was beautifully portrayed at the end of the broadcast. In a montage, images of a father and child on the Nord Stream roller coaster were cropped against images of murdered investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko poisoned with polonium, the soldier who holds up a doll after the MH17 disaster, the jailed Putin critic Navalny and families fleeing Ukraine as fighter jets chase them.