Edmunds Novitkis started the conversation with Nauri Mackevič with the question about the full stands, when Daugavpils moved to the stadium “Esplanade”. The club’s director was not so excited about the new venue: “I will honestly say that Celtnieks is a football stadium with its own aura. You feel more football there. We as a team are guests at Esplanade. There is no football atmosphere as such. Compact stands with the roof does its job in any weather. If there were as clean stands with a roof in Celtnieka, then there would not be fewer people than in “Esplanade”. We train in Celtnieka. We only hold pre-match trainings in “Esplanade”.
“If we reached an average attendance of 500 people, it would be a really good indicator. We had somewhere around 400 this year. The capacity of the grandstands in the Esplanade is about 610 seats. The advantage of the Esplanade is that 400 people make the grandstand look full. But there have been games where people really had nowhere to sit. On the one hand, it makes them happy, but on the other hand, they spit and say that they won’t come next time because they can’t see anything. The stands are very low. The enjoyment of football is not high, except that everything is very close. Those who come for the first time also like it. The fact that you see football players so close is a plus. In the same Celtniek, football is more transparent. At the level we have 500 spectators, it would be normal. If we were fighting for the Eurocups, then it should be around 1000. It is clear that nothing competes with the speedway in Daugavpils. In the third strongest league in Poland, where there was not even a play-off, there are 5000 in every competition,” said the football life supporter in Daugavpils.
There have been claims among the fans that the “Daugavpils” team has become a donor to RFS, very often renting players from the club that won the title of the Premier League this season. Mackevičs did not hide that the most difficult thing is persuading the players to come to Daugavpils: “In 2019, no one else wanted to come to Daugavpils except Balož. Balodim liked us, Toniševs and Regža also came right away. This often happens. Until you have been here, it seems that Daugavpils is a swamp or a pit. That all the people with guns and Russian flags are walking here. Well, that’s not the case! When you come here, you feel good. I won’t name names, but there was one player who got a call back to his club and cried that he had to leave Daugavpils . It’s a stereotype that everything is bad here and you shouldn’t go here. I haven’t heard a single bad review about the time spent in Daugavpils from the rented players.”
“Since October, we have been in talks with “Riga” about potential names that could come to us on loan. We don’t know yet whether they will be or not. The thing with RFS is that there have been good examples. Those footballers who come, they does not disappear after that. Of course, there have been exceptions. I think that someone like Campbell will disappear. The same one in Dumbia proved to us that he is not needed in the RFS. That is, on our platform, they checked whether they need such a player in the future,” noted Mackiewicz .
“We also talked with Valmiera a couple of years ago. However, the range of players is not so wide for them that it would be interesting to rent those players. There really aren’t that many of those players. “Liepāja” has closer options where to give their players – “Tukums “, now probably also “Grobiņa” or “Jelgava”. You can understand them too. We try to work with everyone, but most actively with two top clubs, because they have the widest range of players. “Riga” now has a friendlier club “Auda”, of course, that they will give there, because the training conditions there are still better than in Daugavpils. Nothing has changed. Daugavpils has the worst training conditions, but they become real men,” said the director of BFC “Daugavpils” with harsh irony.
2024-01-13 12:45:00
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