František Chvalovský’s Era Extraña

by @franzgoumet

In 1996, he reached his very top. Never before has he been surrounded by so much praise and, indeed, he probably won’t ever be again. UEFA Euro 96 final took place almost 15 years ago and František Chvalovský, by then the Czech FA chairman, or, more precisely put, a man who had the whole Czech football in his pocket, was sitting and watching the event from his box at Wembley. The Czech national team played Germany in the final that went to extra-time in which Oliver Bierhoff netted his second of the game. Germany won 2-1, leaving the Czech captain Miroslav Kadlec and other players weeping on the ground. Some of the Czech players moved to bigger clubs, some ended their careers shortly after the tournament – none of them, though, experienced such a downfall as their 'Big Papa'.

Chvalovský’s story of making it to the top more or less copies the ones of other enterpreneurs that made in the Czech post-communist era of the 90s. It may sound strange for someone unfamiliar with the Central/Eastern-European conditions but what helped him on his way to become the most powerful person in the Czech football was the fact that he was lucky enough to live in a previously communist state. Chvalovský used to work in a meat company, collecting contacts he would after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 use to establish his own empire. He wasn’t the only one to do that – a lot of smugglers and little criminals, more commonly came to great power during early 1990s. Perhaps the best known, František Mrázek (nicknamed by media as ‘The Godfather‘), had contacts to a lot of influential people and politicians – including the hapless prime minister Stanislav Gross – and successfully controlled a lot of industrial companies only to be found dead later, shot by a still unknown killer. Chvalovský maybe didn’t have PM’s phone number but he certainly was the ‘Mrázek of Czech football‘.

Apart from the business activities, he also played as a goalkeeper for Blšany – a small village near Prague – and a club his father helped to establish. Not much is known about his playing career, mostly due to the fact that during that time Blšany only participated in divisional football. This was to be changed – he has become the chairman of the club and then took his team to promotions and even got them to the first division where they stayed for almost a decade. As his influence was rising, he was elected the head of the FA in 1991 and nothing could stop him from then on. His ten-year tenure (1991–2001) is infamous for setting the roots to everything bad that still disintegrates Czech football – bribery, blackmailing and even kidnapping club officials who happened to have other opinions or were simply too powerful. Chvalovský isn’t the only one responsible – far from that – but he’s perceived as the man during whose reign such methods started to appear, simply because he was the one who introduced them; methods that others would later bring to near-perfection.

Now, how do you stop someone who seems to have all power at their helm? It appears that sometimes all you have to do is to let them slowly destroy themselves and that’s essentially what happened to Chvalovský – first of all, running a professional club based in a village of 1,000 people simply isn’t financially viable on a long-term basis. Secondly, no matter how much he was the Special One, the others tried to plot against him – the same people who still more or less run Czech football now (or certainly ran in post-Chvalovský era in the 00s). And finally, Chvalovský may have possesed a lot of money but eventually struggled to finance all his activities – and that’s what really brought him to the ground. Chvalovský took out big loans from banks which he wasn’t able to pay back and so in 2001 he was arrested at Prague airport and spent several months in jail. He was released after paying the bail but the process went on for 10 years during which he rarely, if ever, made any contacts with the Czech media. In June 2011 (almost exactly 15 years after the Wembley final) the court sentenced him to 10 years in prison.

Horst Siegl playing for Blšany

The circle of the story has finally closed – the ageing boss will probably go to prison and his football offspring Blšany had to cope with a tough situation too. With the exception of their first season in the top flight they constantly struggled to avoid relegation; in the end finally losing the fight in 2005/06 season (coincidentally, also the year when Blšany celebrated their 60th anniversary) and finished at the very bottom of the table. The decrease continued later and soon the club found itself in third division. Now the times – in terms of league position – are even worse than that.

There is now strong will to get the club back to a more reasonable level but as the locals probably know, the gold days are over. This doesn’t stop them from at least dreaming about the Chvalovský’s days when they welcomed the likes of Sparta Prague (this is probably the reason why on their official internet site they call František Chvalovský in a familiar way and attachedly keep quiet about the dark side of his personality, should there ever have been a bright one).

It’s a shame that the club where Petr Čech made his first professional appearences (he was transferred to Sparta Prague in 2001 – part of the fee is said to have been used to cover Chvalovský’s bail) could not keep its position. But, in the end, try to imagine Crawley Town reaching Premier League football in ten years – who gets the money clearly gets immense power but you can’t buy everything for them, can you? At the end of the day, this story was never going to be a fairytale and Chvalovský has hardly ever come close to being called Santa Claus. There is only one thing they can’t take away from him, though – he’ll always have his Wembley.