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I randomly stumbled upon this article, and really enjoyed it. If you have time, I highly recommend it (sorry, it's long though).
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Imagine Mark Cuban with three times as many teams and five times as much money. He'd still be a piker compared with the Russian zillionaires who offer a life of luxury to lure world-class athletes and are bankrolling a new national sports machine.
ALLOW HIM to lead you through the chambers of his Moscow office, the entire floor of a six-story building he owns, and Shabtai von Kalmanovic, international businessman, former Soviet spy, lifelong Basketball Bennie will impress upon you one additional entry on his resume. "I am a collector," he says between gestures toward his private acquisitions. Here are rooms full of menorahs and mezuzahs, part of a collection of Judaica so impressive, he says, that rabbis come from around the world to inspect it. Here too are Faberge eggs and Russian folk paintings and Soviet curiosities such as a limited-edition chess set (Red Bolsheviks vs. White Russians) commissioned by Stalin himself.
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Today Russian businessmen no longer merely vie with one another to see who can win domestic titles in soccer, Basketball and hockey. They've also taken their competitiveness to the world stage, where they own several of the most storied soccer clubs in the English Premier League, including Chelsea (the pride of oligarch Roman Abramovich) and Arsenal (in which metals, lumber and media mogul Alisher Usmanov holds a 24% stake).
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... Abramovich, who grants virtually no interviews, has made one public comment that begins to explain himself, and it could serve as the Oligarchs' Credo: "The goal is to win. It's not about making money. I have many much less risky ways of making money. I don't want to throw my money away, but it's really about having fun, and that means success and trophies."
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Imagine Mark Cuban with three times as many teams and five times as much money. He'd still be a piker compared with the Russian zillionaires who offer a life of luxury to lure world-class athletes and are bankrolling a new national sports machine.
ALLOW HIM to lead you through the chambers of his Moscow office, the entire floor of a six-story building he owns, and Shabtai von Kalmanovic, international businessman, former Soviet spy, lifelong Basketball Bennie will impress upon you one additional entry on his resume. "I am a collector," he says between gestures toward his private acquisitions. Here are rooms full of menorahs and mezuzahs, part of a collection of Judaica so impressive, he says, that rabbis come from around the world to inspect it. Here too are Faberge eggs and Russian folk paintings and Soviet curiosities such as a limited-edition chess set (Red Bolsheviks vs. White Russians) commissioned by Stalin himself.
...
Today Russian businessmen no longer merely vie with one another to see who can win domestic titles in soccer, Basketball and hockey. They've also taken their competitiveness to the world stage, where they own several of the most storied soccer clubs in the English Premier League, including Chelsea (the pride of oligarch Roman Abramovich) and Arsenal (in which metals, lumber and media mogul Alisher Usmanov holds a 24% stake).
...
... Abramovich, who grants virtually no interviews, has made one public comment that begins to explain himself, and it could serve as the Oligarchs' Credo: "The goal is to win. It's not about making money. I have many much less risky ways of making money. I don't want to throw my money away, but it's really about having fun, and that means success and trophies."
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