Boris Mayorov, two-time Olympic champion and member of the board of directors of the Russian Hockey Federation (RHF), said in an interview with that he did not vote for expanding the limit of foreign players in the KHL, noting that the league did not do so. We absolutely do not need foreign hockey players.
Starting from the 2023/24 season, Russian teams in the Fonbet KHL Championship cannot include more than three foreigners in their application for matches. The KHL turned to the Ministry of Sports of the Russian Federation with a proposal to increase the limit on foreign athletes. The FHR coaches council unanimously opposed it.
– The leaders of the playoffs were young Russians – Dmitry Silantyev, Maxim Berezkin (14 points each), Artur Kayumov, Roman Kantserov (12 each), Danila Yurov (9)… This is a consequence of the fact that the KHL introduced a limit of three foreign players per team and the level of the league dropped?
— I wouldn’t say that the level of the KHL has fallen. This is far from true. And this level has always been maintained not by foreign players, but by Russian hockey. Think about it yourself: three foreign players in a team – can they change the structure of the game? Probably not. It is the foreigners who must adapt to the hockey played by this or that team.
Now I see in the press: “Well, an increase in the number of foreign players will lead to the fact that we will get rich from foreign hockey.” But what type of enrichment are we talking about? Our hockey will absorb these foreign players who come to the KHL. They must adapt to our conditions. This is the most serious error of those who advocate this. I don’t understand at all the criteria by which people vote to increase the number of foreign players to five. Someone fucked someone. And so we got this result.
— But the FHR board voted for five foreign players.
— I would not want to address this subject in print. Let me just say that as a board member, I did not vote for it. I am generally an opponent of foreign players in our hockey. Three per club – let them be. But what, in “Spartak” the main roles are played by Patrick Rybar, Joseph Keane or Shane Prince? How many foreign names can you name who are system-building players at their KHL clubs? You can count them on the fingers of one hand.
“The same “Salavat Yulaev”, with five legionnaires, made up the first five and gave them the first brigade of the majority.
— There were Finnish collections, which later became Olympic champions. They made the difference in the Ufa team, I agree. But this is not the case now,” Mayorov told .
Watch live broadcasts of the Fonbet KHL Championship playoff matches on the channel, as well as on the matchtv.ru and sportbox.ru sites.
Source : MatchTV
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