How much did the best football player in Russia earn in the early 1990s? When he went to Spain, his salary quadrupled
Viktor Onopko was the captain of the Russian national team and the best team in the country in the 1990s - Moscow Spartak. He was twice recognized as the best football player of the season - in 1992 and 1993. Therefore, it is curious to know how all these achievements, titles and regalia paid off financially.
Onopko moved to Spartak at the beginning of 1992 from Shakhtar Donetsk. To persuade Victor to move to Moscow, the selector of the Moscow club, Viktor Pokrovsky, specially came to his home.
“I seriously thought about Spartak’s offer for a couple of days, and at first I was inclined to stay in Donetsk,” says Onopko. — My wife is from there, near my native Lugansk. And the team at Shakhtar was wonderful. Plus they did a lot for me personally there - they bought an apartment, a car, helped me get into college. But in the end, the final decision was made... by my wife. She is the daughter of the famous former football player Viktor Zvyagintsev. Natalya said: we have to go! She probably understood how much I liked Spartak. Therefore, when Oleg Ivanovich called me and confirmed that he wanted to see me on the team, I replied that I was ready for the transition. “I’ll take the tickets and leave,” I said. My wife and I boarded the train and went to Moscow.”
Interestingly, Onopko was not given an apartment in Moscow right away. At first, he lived with his wife at the Spartak base in Tarasovka, then this practice was widespread. Other legends of the club went through the same life - Valery Karpin, Ilya Tsymbalar, Yuri Nikiforov.
“My wife and I were put in one room of a two-room suite; one of the other guys lived in the other,” Onopko recalls. — For the first month, Natalya and I slept as jacks on a narrow bed. She didn’t complain - fortunately, she grew up in a football family, she did rhythmic gymnastics herself and had a great idea of the life of athletes.”
Onopko received an apartment only six months after he moved to Spartak - in Izmailovo, on 7th Parkovaya. A couple of years after this, his living conditions were further improved - he was given a much more spacious and comfortable apartment on Rublevskoye Highway. It was initially made for himself by the vice-president of Spartak Grigory Esaulenko - layout, repairs.
Well, now, actually, about Onopko’s salary at Spartak. Today he calmly names numbers.
“Salaries at Spartak, when I first arrived there, fluctuated around 200-300 dollars. At the same time, we could earn decent bonuses during the winter pre-season tournaments. They fed us well. Therefore, we fought very seriously for victories in them. Bonuses were received in foreign currency - German marks and Dutch guilders.
Both our salaries and bonuses were given to us by Nikolai Petrovich Starostin. He came with a statement, we signed and received the money.
Romantsev did not get involved in money matters. For him, the main thing was that the team played, the guys carried out the installation, and that everyone was paid on time. But there was no need to worry about this - in the early 1990s, these issues were perfectly covered by Starostin.
We signed our first contracts about a year and a half after I moved to Spartak. The amounts have increased significantly. The players of the main team began to receive from 8 to 10 thousand dollars. I received 10. It seems that they began to pay them in dollars, although before that they were paid in rubles.”
At the beginning of 1996, Onopko left Spartak for Spain, for Oviedo. “I always liked Spain as a country, and my salary there was four times more than at Spartak,” Victor shared these details. In general, one can understand why so many football players left the country in the 1990s. With us, they only dreamed of such money.
