When St Patrick’s Athletic arrive in Sofia to face doyens of Bulgarian football CSKA on Thursday, they will be stepping one foot in a political drama that at once promises to reinvigorate domestic football in the country whilst threatening its longest-held traditions. It comes at the end of nearly a decade of scheming and intrigue.
In early 2014, domestic football in Bulgaria was going down and taking its most celebrated club with it. Local support for the league had not kept pace with the growth in interest in foreign football, and attendances at the Bulgarian Army Stadium that could be relied upon to top 70,000 in CSKA’s heyday — as it did when the team beat Bayern Munich 4-3 in the first leg of their European Cup semi-final in 1982 — had reduced to a trickle. Left to drift and to decay by the government and football authorities, financial infrastructure buckled under mounting debt, until it could bear the weight no longer.
Plans to relieve the pressure by making CSKA the first football club to be floated on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange failed, and bowing to supporter pressure the beleaguered owner, Aleksandar Tomov, handed control to two of the club’s “Ultra” supporters, whose responsibility it would be to find the necessary investment to keep the business from going under.
This much they achieved — the club was sold to the oligarch Grisha Ganchev, at that moment owner of CSKA’s great rivals, Litex Lovech — but not in time to persuade the Bulgarian Football Union (BFU) that they were financially ready for the approaching 2015/16 season; the club’s license was torn up, and one of the great football names of the former Communist Bloc was banished to play in the wilderness of Bulgaria’s third tier.
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The current season finds the club on the upswing. This is their seventh season back in the top flight — despite a fire sale of the squad, their single season in the third division yielded a ludicrous league record of 31 wins from 32 games and a laughable 146 goals scored — and a fifth consecutive year in Europe.
The club — who since returning to the top flight have registered four runners-up finishes to the new dominant force in Bulgarian football, Ludogorets Razgrad — seemed to have pulled off something of a coup in November 2020 with the appointment as technical director of former Newcastle United and West Ham United manager, Alan Pardew. His remit, in a statement issued by the club, was to use his “vast experience and contacts ... to attract players,” a not unwise contingency in the context of the financial crash that previously brought the club collapsing down around itself.
When the first-team manager, Stoycho Mladenov, was sacked in April 2022 with CKSA having failed to mount a title challenge against Ludogorets, Pardew was installed as manager on a deal due to run to the end of the 2022/23 season. All was going well, until a problem familiar to Bulgarian football raised its head to derail the operation.
“After the Bulgaria v England game in Sofia in 2019 [when England players were racially abused], the BFU launched a campaign to try to eradicate the problem of racism,” says Metodi Shumanov, a journalist who had helped the BFU to promote their antiracism message. “But there is much work still to do. The Botev Plovdiv match against CSKA last season was a huge scandal.”
During that game in May, four of the club’s black players were racially abused by their own supporters, including having bananas thrown at them from the stands. Less than two weeks later, Pardew resigned, citing that “events before and during the match were not acceptable to me.” Yet despite the manager’s disgust, there was more lurking in the murky depths of internal club politics than met the eye.
“CSKA lost the cup final to Levski Sofia a few weeks before,” says Shumanov. “A group of hard-core supporters, who were very upset, broke into the stadium in protest and caused some damage, then they began to boycott the games. There is civil war within the club right now.
“There are a lot of foreign players on the CSKA team who are considered mercenaries by the hard-core supporters. They insist on more Bulgarians playing for the club, which is why there was that response during the Plovdiv game. The relationship between the Ultras and the club is broken.
“The club is now turning their attention to other types of fans; families and children. They organise these ‘CSKA afternoons’ with club legends in attendance for supporters. Dimitar Berbatov was there recently. Hristo Stoichkov will be there for the St Patrick’s game on Thursday. They are trying to make the club more family friendly.”
And so, amid Pardew’s principled departure, a once cast-iron link between CSKA and its Ultra supporters has been broken, possibly for good. It could be a long-overdue catalyst for a cleansing of the last vestiges of discrimination that continues to embarrass Bulgarian football.
Or, unthinkably for a domestic game that continues to teeter on the financial brink, it could drive a stake through the game’s heart, splitting it off from supporters that were once its lifeblood, and booting the whole edifice over the edge.
