ATB owner starts financing a football club

BGV Group, co-owner of the ATB store chain Hennadii Butkevych, has started actively financing the Polissia First League municipal club from Zhytomyr.

The director of the club Volodymyr Zahurskyi reported about it in an interview with the Tribuna.

He clarified that BGV officially became the primary sponsor of Polissia last year, but they've just begun financial infusions.

According to the director, the club's budget for the new season is a trade secret. However, Volodymyr Zahurskyi clarified that 10.8 million hryvnias were allocated from the regional and city budgets of the club, the rest of the money was invested by the primary sponsor.

"We don't have any firm commitment to numbers. We have funding as needed, so there is simply no specific figure," the director of "Polissia" said about funding from the BVG Group.

According to the publication, the Zhytomyr team is now named as one of the favorites of the first league along with Kharkiv's Metalist of Oleksandr Yaroslavskyi and Kryvyi Rih's Kryvbas, which emerged on the initiative of President Volodymyr Zelenskyi by renaming another football club.

At the same time, if last season's salaries in Polissia were limited to 30 thousand hryvnias a month, now the team leaders receive 100-150 thousand hryvnias, which corresponds to the level of the domestic Premier League, where Polissia plans to make its way.

The head coach replacement for Yurii Kalitvintsev, the ex-coach of Ukraine's national team, is also connected with the influence of the primary sponsor.

The  100% owner of Polissia Football Club is Zhytomyr City Council. According to the rules, the teams that took the first and second places in the First League will go to the elite division following the results of this season. The third and fourth teams of the First League will play head-to-head matches with the 14th and 13th clubs of the UFL.