Bulgaria Football Chaos Threatens the Beautiful Game

The Bulgarian football league is in utter chaos and amazingly the situation has become so serious that the very existence of professional football in Bulgaria is under threat.

Who would have thought back in the 1990s when Bulgarian football was on top of the world (Bulgaria reached the semi-finals of the USA 1994 World Cup) and the top flight in Bulgaria was producing new stars every day that Bulgarian football would find itself in the depth of the black hole that it is now in?

There have always been scandals regarding the football league in Bulgaria - crooked referees, bent owners and over emotional footballers - but never before have so many scandals piled up on top of each other.

It all started in May 2008 when CSKA Sofia won their 31st league title but failed to meet the Bulgarian Football Union's (BFU) licensing criteria because of debts to the state and creditors, thus abandoning hopes to participate in UEFA's Champions League and facing the threat of being banished to the country's third division. This affair bought the Bulgarian league's problem out into the focus of the international media and it has never left it since.

The rest of 2008 and 2009 was dominated by scandals at CSKA with a checkup of the so-called "Kushlev" Commission finding out that the former President of the CSKA Football Club and former Director of the troubled steel mill "Kremikovtzi", Alexander Tomov, and his wife own real estate that they could not afford only on their listed salaries. Tomov was later charged and his case is still in court.

From CSKA the scandals spread with illegal betting rings run by the Balkan's drugs lords being uncovered and referees being banned for ‘incompetence' nearly every week. Since the beginning of September however the situation has become critical.

On September 4 the BFU gave four-match bans to two referees for poor officiating in recent league games - leading to new suspicions of match-fixing on a major scale.

On September 19 Bulgaria's champion's Levski Sofia released 4 players just before the always violent derby against CSKA. The players were reportedly supposed to sign for Russian champions Rubin but on Monday all of them were back in Sofia. On Friday it was revealed that by the President of Levski, Todor Batkov, that he had received phone threats from Russia warning him to stop an investigation into the case, which allegedly involves a million dollar international betting scam.

To top it all off on Friday it was also announced that eight of the top football clubs in Bulgaria owe the State over BGN 8 M in taxes. Among them the biggest debtor is CSKA with over BGN 2 M owed to the National Revenue Agency (NRA). The other seven football teams involved in large-scale tax evasion are "Litex," "Locomotive Sofia," "Locomotive Plovdiv," "Beroe," "Belasitsa," "Botev," and "Marek." The State institutions are yet to officially confirm the information and name the clubs.

The question is: Can the league that has produced world greats such as Hristo Stoichkov and Dimitar Berbatov ever recover or is it doomed to a slow and painful death?

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