The “urgent request to fans and the media to keep calm” was not broadcast over loudspeakers in slowly moving cars in Krefeld on Thursday. That would have had a more dramatic effect, but the district club KFC Uerdingen has instead contented itself with an identical message on its website. These fans! And especially this media! The latter was eaten by the investor in the third division soccer team – Mikhail Ponomarew, 46, Russian with his adopted home in Meerbusch – anyway. Not to forget the local politicians who on Wednesday denied him and his club the extensive financing of a professional football-friendly renovation of the local stadium ruin called Grotenburg.
For this reason, the Krefeld footballers have been competing for every home game in neighboring Düsseldorf for a year and a half, where expensive rents are incurred for the use of the arena, which the KFC should not have paid on time recently. An agreement had been reached with the arena operator, the club said. The allegedly endangered league game against Türkgücü Munich on Saturday will take place as planned, it said. According to media reports, a payment will then be due on Monday: outstanding rents totaling almost a quarter of a million euros.
Investor Ponomarew wants to get out again next summer at the latest
Ponomarew, who took over relevant shares in Uerdinger Fußball-GmbH five years ago and was also elected president of the club that ultimately had decision-making powers a year later, wants to get out of the KFC next summer at the latest. The reasons for his planned withdrawal are obvious: no stadium, no fans due to the Corona, currently hardly any sporting success – and despite all these deficits, running costs, which, not least in terms of player salaries, are more at the second division level. When the fired 2014 world champion Kevin Großkreutz recently sued for outstanding salaries plus a severance payment totaling 442,500 euros, they learned that he earned around 50,000 euros a month at the KFC.
The crux of the club’s financial difficulties is: In the second division, in which Ponomarew actually wanted to lead the KFC with all his might, one would get relevant higher television money on the income side – not in the third division. But what do you do with Ponomarew’s entry in the city of Krefeld’s Golden Book on the occasion of the third division promotion in 2018, if the Russian actually withdraws? Can Tipp-Ex be used there?
KFC has announced that there are currently “constructive discussions with potential investors”
In any case, Ponomarev threatens to leave scorched earth behind. Obituaries are already being written in various media for this club, which even played in the European Cup at its best as Bundesliga club Bayer 05 Uerdingen, but fell into the fifth division after the name sponsor left and suffered a total of three bankruptcies in 2003, 2005 and 2007. If Ponomarew got out without a succession solution, the fourth bankruptcy might be due. And that might be the last.
It is unforgotten how in October 2019 the then player Manuel Konrad vividly portrayed a Pomomarew cabin freak after a lost game: “He threw tables around and hit the fridge with his fist, insane, a monster in the cabin had a knife that would have slaughtered us. ” In the same month, Stefan Effenberg was hired as a manager at KFC, but only stayed until May 2020. Since Ponomarew took over as owner in 2015, the team has had 15 coaches. That results in an average of three per calendar year. In March 2019, as an example, Ponomarew dismissed Norbert Meier after only 40 days and called him the “worst coach in KFC history”.
The association has just announced that there are currently “constructive discussions with potential investors”. So the KFC Uerdingen is not history yet
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