Weisfeld: ‘I don’t think tightening the limit on foreign players will necessarily cause an increase in wages’

hockey specialist Leonid Weisfeld in an interview with , he suggested what consequences a decrease in the number of foreign players in club applications could have KHL .

The Ministry of Sports of the Russian Federation had previously officially approved the proposal of the Russian Hockey Federation (FHR) to tighten the limit of legionnaires in the KHL to three people when bidding for the match. In the current season, five foreigners can be entered per game. The order will come into effect on August 1, 2023.

– By how much will the salary of the best Russian players increase due to the tightening of the limit of foreign players?

For some reason, everyone is talking about wage growth, forgetting that there is a ceiling and there is a market. In my opinion, all these thoughts about raising salaries are just theories, but nobody knows yet how everything will turn out in practice. If a person has driven a Zhiguli all his life, then for him, because Mercedes are becoming more and more expensive, nothing changes at all.

I don’t think that tightening the Legionnaire limit will necessarily cause a salary increase, although it is not excluded. But there is certainly no linear relationship here. Because the best players will not be left without work, and they will always receive money – Legionnaires or Russians – it does not matter. But I admit that average players can raise their prices. Have any clubs released their money due to the reduced limit? And how the agents will behave in this situation, it is not known. For example, they will take it and say: now we want more. And for any club there will be a dilemma – fight for a great player, offer him a crazy salary, or take three good ones instead? The second choice seems more reliable, Weisfeld noted.