This Thursday, Bulgaria is supposed to host the Euro 2024 qualification game against Hungary. A vital one for Hungary, as they have still not solidified their spot in the euros, and a first test for new Bulgarian coach Ilian Iliev. It was originally supposed to take place in Sofia, however it is as of now entirely uncertain where the match will take place, or whether it will take place at all. Entirely at fault here is the Bulgarian football union (BFS) in their reaction to a situation, developed mosty over the past month (though a result of horrible mismanagement over the past 18 years). In this post, I will do my best to summarize what happened leading up to this scandal.
14th Oct 2023:
Bulgaria - Lithuania is plyed in Sofia. After a 1-1 draw in the away fixture, Bulgaria are heavy favorites at home. After Levski captain Adrian Kraev is sent off at the end of the first half, Lithuania defeats Bulgaria 0-2. This sparks outrage in the stadium and online, as this is seen by pretty much everyone, myself included, as possibly the lowest low Bulgarian football has reached (yet!). After some quite frankly embarassing interviews by the (now ex) head coach, and (current) technical director Georgi Ivanov (Levski legend), stating that things are more or less fine, discussions of the BFS’s incompetence and corruption gained a lot of traction.
18th Oct 2023:
As he sees a golden opportunity, current frontrunner for new head of the BFS, (firmly against the current administration) Dimitar Berbatov (Manchester United legend) arranges an interview discussionwith Darik - a very popular Bulgarian national radio and media site. As a direct response, BFS vice president Yordan Lechkov also organizes the same, immediately after Berbatov’s one. He insists on a live debate with Berbatov, but Berbatov declines. Berbatov’s interview is the generic (and in this case very reasonable) “the BFS is an awful and corrupt organization and we need to uproot it”. More interestingly, in Lechkov’s interview, he deflects all blame on behalf of the BFS, instead opting to blame everyone else, from the state, to Bulgarian football clubs for playing foreigners over Bulgarians, to the NT players, even specifically pointing to Andrian Kraev as the reason for the loss to Lithuania. He also uttered a now very infamous phrase, roughly translating to
“Who wants us to resign?”.
The question speead like wildfire throughout wildfire throughout media sites and social media.
19th Oct 2023:
Retired footballer Boyko Velichkov came out with a post on social media, suggesting that fans in every club stadium chant “resignation” at minute 18. Minute 18 is decided on, as that is how many years the BFS has been in power for.
Later in October:
Velichkov’s idea is implementing, as nearly every first dicision game in Bulgaria has the chants in the 18th minute. From more populated stadiums like those of Botev Plovdiv, CAKA-Sofia and especially Levski, to the less visited ones like those in Vratsa and Pazarzhik.
An organization starts to take shape, where fans of every big club are to come together for Bulgaria - Hungary (said to take place in Sofia), sit in a specific, organized fashion to prevent violence between supporters of different teams, and explicitly tell the BFS and UEFA exactly what they think about the horrendous massacre of Bulgarian football at the hands of the BFS. The protest is specifically intended to be a peaceful one.
6th Nov 2023
The BFS announces that, due to a recommendation by UEFA, the game will be moved from the national stadium in Sofia to Hristo Botev stadium in Plovdiv and that THERE WILL BE NO HOME FANS ALLOWED. The UEFA recommendation was later confirmed to be based on an undisclosed report of the BFS with safety concerns raised. Clearly, BFS president Boby Mihailov used his very much existing power within UEFA to cause the move. Fans are very obviously outraged, but I will stop mentioning that as it is assumed from this point on.
10th Nov 2023:
The mayor of Plovdiv says that the match cannot be played in Plovdiv. Main reason for which being that the stadium is not fully built, with heavy construction being planned for the international break, as Botev Plovdiv do not play there for 3 weeks.
11th Nov 2023:
The owner of the construction firm that builds the stadium, Iliyan Filipov is interviewed by Darik, where he states that multiple people from BFS have demanded that he send a letter, claiming thag the stadium is safe to use, threatening him that failure to comply, could make it so that the BFS revokes the licences of both Plovdiv clubs. The BFS denies the allegations and “leaks” a taped phone call between their representative and Filipov, where a letter is requested, and where a revocation of the stadium’s license is heavily implied.
13th Nov 2023 (today):
The municipality of Plovdiv officially comes out with a statement that the match can and will not be played in Plovdiv, due to the ingoing construction work. There is growing speculatiom, as to whether or not the game can be played at all. Boby Mihailov states that if Bulgaria ends up unable to host the game, we could get banned from all European competitions. Meanwhile, no word on moving it back to Sofia.
Darik reports on rumors of the game being moved to Karzhali (3+ hour drive from Sofia, where the Hungarian NT will land). Darik interviews the Mayor of Pazardzhik, who says that “it is 99% certain”, among a bunch of obvious lies peddled to him by the BFS (the man is clearly not very knowledgable on the matter). Hungarians, who follow the situation are very unhappy about what their team would need to be put through.
As of yet, nothing is official, and the situation is developing very quickly. Even if Pazardhik is decided on to host the match, UEFA still needs to approve the decision. I will make sure to update this post with the latest unformation for those interested.
Sources: Dsport.bg and my own personal speculation, which I have attempted to make obvious when present.
If you’ve managed to get to the end of this post, thank you very much for the interest in the situation and our general crisis. Sadly, I do not anticipate this post getting much traction.
The whole Plovdiv stadium situation made it truly bizzare, as well as the excuses at the end “and now the evil FIFA and evil Plovdiv was it that forced us to play behind closed doors, not us…”
Ayyy they finally made a decision. Will be played in Sofia.
All I wonder is, why? What is the endgame of the guys currently running BFS? Power? But what value does it have when the thing they have power over keeps losing value and gets smaller and smaller?
This is an actual crisis caused by the Bulgarian FA and they definitely have to pay for it.
upvoted, interesting post. wish there was more of this here.
They’re scum, kicked out my village’s team out of the amateur divisions because they supported Berbatov… they did it to many amateur teams
This is the lowest of lows, so sorry for all of you
This is the problem in Poland as well. It looks like fairly democratic process. Clubs designate their local representatives and they elect FA president/board/we. But at the same time, local representatives gain too much power and do whatever they can to hold power, so any reasonable change is thwarted.
Just a bit of a background why people hate the BFS:
We used to be quite decent in football between the 1950s and 1990s - we featured in the - 62, 66, 70, 74, 86, 94 and 98 WCs and had some pretty good players along the way, although during socialism most of them were not allowed to play abroad. Last big tournament we featured was Euro 2004. One year later Bobby The Wig became BFS president. And has been ever since. We haven’t produced even an average player in a decade. We have no players in any top 4 leagues. The upper half of our clubs play with 80-90% foreigners. Bobby doesn’t give a shit. In fact, he claims that BFS are doing their job perfectly and it’s the clubs fault that they don’t produce any good players. Which is false since it’s explicitly said in the BFS manifesto that youth development is their job. The league is a total joke - we have a boutique little club formed in 2010 owned by a billionaire which has won the league 12-13 times in a row because they just buy the best foreigners. Stadiums are shit.
We have no players in any top 4 leagues. The upper half of our clubs play with 80-90% foreigners.
That’s madness, how does that even happen? Completely neglecting youth football can only do so much harm, that sounds like straight up sabotage
Well, youth football is hard and costs money to do it properly. You need good coaches, infrastructure investment, etc, just for a product to maybe happen in 7-8 years. If you’re a club owner, it’s much easier and faster to just get ready foreign products, usually on free, and hope to sell them abroad for small profit. That’s the business model for most clubs. They don’t want that changed, therefore they elect The Wig every 4 years, knowing that he won’t pressure them to do anything (methodology, investment).
Like, don’t get me wrong, FANS hate Bobby, but club owners (mostly) LOVE him. He just lets them do whatever they want.
The owners of most big bulgarian clubs (apart from Ludogorets - aka the billionaire club) tend to scout free agent foreigners and bring them in by the dozen.
The script they all follow is standard by now: bring in foreigner for no money, hope he does well, sell him in a season or two for profit, rinse and repeat. Because of this, clubs never really improve, because even if one of them has a good season, chances are by the next season they will sell half of their team and replace them with new free agents.
This basically means very few youth players make it into the starting 11’s. Also because of the way the BFS has managed our football for the past 20 years, the youth systems are completely fucked as well. You can walk into any age group of a big clubs youth system and it’s almost guaranteed you’ll see at least 3-4 kids in the starting 11 who are absolutely shit, but they’re playing because their parents are paying.
To this day, french people (maybe not the younger generation :X )still remember the trauma of the elimination in the 94 qualifiers against Bulgaria and the 2 goals Kostadinov scored.
Kostadinov, who the whole nation used to adore because of these 2 goals, is BFS vice president. Now everyone hates him.
Ah I see, the Platini of Bulgaria
Oh, damn. He was one of my favourites from that team. :(
Unrelated to the post, I just found myself frustratingly trying to get the goddamn hair of my screen.
Nice one.
Do y’all only have one suitable venue to host a NT game?
Now I don’t know what you need for that, and also how the city would handle such a thing but is Sofia the only place? The fact they wanted to host it at a stadium under construction is fucking wild.
This is mad - surely UEFA should be pressuring them more here and shouldn’t have let them get this far? Insane crisis from the BFS though
UEFA doesn’t care about corruption in national federations as long as the politicians stay away from them.
They don’t care enough to intervene and clean the mess of each individual country (assuming they aren’t part of the corruption themselves in the first place). In multiple countries you will see people asking for UEFA to intervene against corrupt FAs, it almost never happens, because they don’t think it’s their problem.
The silent message they send is “you re on your own, and no visible government involvement because we re not setting this precedent”.
Bulgaria gave Lithuania confidence that we haven’t seen in decades, so thanks for that
Enough is enough. These clowns in the Bulgarian Football Union need to resign.
Mauritius, my country has been in a similar situation for years. The people who are currently in charge are backed by the government and they are clearly using the federations funds for their own purposes and sadly nothing can be done about it. Our league was completely stopped since Covid and only restarted at the end of 2022 and ended early 2023. The new season has not even started and we dont have any official news when it will start again… We might be the only country that plays international football (we are playing against Cameroon this Friday and we will get fucked as usual) which its leagues is currently not active…
Good post. Thanks OP for this interesting bit.
This is the quality content we rarely see here, thank you.
Some 16 years ago I remember dreading the thought of playing Bulgaria. They had a decent NT with the likes of Berbatov and Petrov, Bojinov was still a prospect.
Now Bulgaria seems like a certain target in any group stage fixture. Not gonna lie, I hove we play Bulgaria in that stupid Nations League, as they are clearly weaker than Kosovo for example.
Eastern Europe and the Balkans seem doomed, and UEFA can’t really do anything about it(nor do they wish to, as easily to corrupt federation heads can be swayed).