New elites of Russia: from rags to football riches
Petya Listerman - have you heard of this? The man's job is to bring rich men together with ladies looking for a luxurious life. Some people call them pimps. And if earlier the clients of such people were the owners of factories and steamships, then from a certain time athletes became the desired “daddies” - first of all, football players and hockey players.
Scandals with their families regularly erupt. Here, for example, is the conflict between Ottawa Senators hockey player Nikita Zaitsev and his ex-wife. The player accused her of using illegal substances right at home, and she even brought her lover. In response, she also thoroughly pelted Nikita with mud. Brrr, in general! However, everything is predictable.
But, perhaps, the Mamaev couple, Alana and Pavel, distinguished themselves most in this field. The latter, let me remind you, is a football player who served time in prison together with another football player Kokorin after hitting a prominent official with a chair in a cafe. The Mamaevs regularly find themselves in scandalous news, uncovering mud throwers and dividing up property and children.
It would seem that so be it. But this case is very interesting. Here Alana Mamaeva declares, regretting that she forgave her husband after prison: “We should have let him drown in that shit!” And the reason is simple: Pavel cheated with a Spanish woman. But it’s not the first time, but how many times have you been through it? So why such torment?
And here Alana involuntarily makes an explanatory note:
“He gives you gifts, registers cars in your name, plans a vacation, plans to buy a house. And at the same time he hires prostitutes abroad, thinking that no one will know about it. I couldn't stand it. You can make a mistake once and make a mistake. But twice is no longer a mistake or an accident, it’s a pattern.”
Just gifts, houses, cars - all this is extremely, let’s say, important. And in many ways this is the meaning of the existence of such characters. Because, with rare exceptions, the wife of a football player is a kind of sophisticated profession that has gained many adherents, these hunters for a beautiful and very beautiful life. And it is no secret that athletes who are not very intelligent are followed by those who do not want to do anything, but want to live very beautifully.
If we look at the wives of Russian football players/hockey players, and such ratings are published regularly, we will see something like an attack of clones - everything is like a selection, these big-lipped, chemically drenched divas, differing from each other exactly as much as Chinese tomatoes differ. But their husbands - football players - like it, and even really like it. Which, by the way, once again speaks about the level, intellectual and moral, of these same football players.
It’s just that at a certain moment they settled down in the state so warmly and comfortably that they became a privileged caste, to which hunters of wealth gravitate just as passionately as, for example, to the caste of top managers. And the horror of this story is that the country gives birth to such dubious elites - it gives them the opportunity to take off out of the blue, forming a caste of the elite from those who in the old days would not have been allowed to have enough to eat even in the dressing room. And this is also a kind of sentence.
Russian version :: Read in English : Russia's New Elites: From Rags to Football Princes