1. Following the🧵which showed the connections between the KHL and the Kremlin, Putin and his cronies, this one will explain how the KHL became a tool for Putin’s expansionist plans in the soft-power area of hockey.
2. The KHL had just started in 2008 when Zurich crushed KHL’s Metallurg Magnitogorsk 5-0 in the 2009 Champions Hockey League final. In the VIP-section, KHL-boss Alexander Medvedev ripped off his Metallurg jersey in disgust after the Swiss’ 3-0 goal. 
3. A couple of days later, Medvedev informed that Russian energy giant Gazprom (where Medvedev was VP) would leave as CHL sponsor and that KHL clubs would no longer play in Europe. The CHL folded.
4. The KHL saw the CHL as a threat. Not only did it show that European teams could beat KHL clubs, but a strong Euro club tournament was in conflict with the KHL’s own vision of being a “major international league”. The KHL wanted the KHL champion to also be the European champ.
5. Such a positioning would be impossible in any other team sport in Europe, but it was possible in hockey as the IIHF’s then president René Fasel was so close to Putin, and he sided more with Putin’s KHL than with the IIHF’s own CHL.
6. At the same time, KHL’s Salavat signed Alexander Radulov who was under contract with Nashville. Fasel could have stopped this transfer, but again he sided with the KHL. This severed the relations between the NHL and the IIHF and killed the NHL vs IIHF Victoria Cup.
7. At an IIHF club forum in Barcelona 2012, Alex Medvedev painted his vision for a pan-European league; 32 KHL-clubs and 32 clubs from western Europe would form a 64-team league, Europe’s version of the NHL.
8. The Gazprom VP was dreaming in all colors of the rainbow. The top European clubs would never leave their national leagues, and in effect destroy them, to join an unrealistic colossus league run by Gazprom from Moscow.
9. But this meeting set the tone. Financed by oil and gas money, the KHL would be the “major international league”. If the Euro clubs didn’t want to join, the KHL would recruit them.
10. Also, by not letting their Russian teams compete in Europe, the KHL could claim European superiority as they didn’t risk losing. Genius.
11. In the years that followed, KHL managed to either entice some existing clubs to swap leagues, or it created “clubs” specifically designed for KHL play. Either way, a club that joined the KHL knew only one thing for sure – that it would lose money. Huge money.
12. The big catch was Finnish Jokerit Helsinki in 2014. Jokerit owner Hjallis Harkimo ran such a bad hockey business that he was relieved to sell the team and the Hartwall arena to Russian billionaires and Putin cronies, Timchenko and Rotenberg.
13. Since 2014, Jokerit has been losing €13-15m annually, occasionally €2m per month. The Russian owners paid all bills and debts as the Helsinki club was really the lone “franchise” that justified the KHL being a “major international league”.
14. During these years, Jokerit has lost more than €100m in total. All the other European clubs that joined the KHL had the same kind of “business model”. All of them were basically insolvent all the time, but often saved by influx of energy money.
15. How ludicrous was Jokerit’s KHL idea? It’s 3km between Jokerit’s arena and IFK Helsinki’s rink. These great rivals could no longer meet in heated derby-games as Jokerit needed to fly 6500km to Khabarovsk or 6300km to China to play games with zero history.
16. The attempts to attract western clubs to the KHL was a monumental failure. The only western, non-Russian owned club which made the jump was Slovan Bratislava, 2012. Once it pulled out in 2019, the club was penniless with debts through the roof, saved by new ownership.
17. In 2014, Putin decided that Medvedev was done and he handed the KHL top job to Dmitry Chernyshenko (L) who was the president of Sochi 2014, the most corrupt games in Olympic history, where dirty urine samples were swapped through a hole in the wall in the middle of the night.
18. Chernyshenko was later removed from a IOC Commission for Beijing 2022 by the IOC due to his involvement in the Sochi doping scandal, but that was never a problem for the KHL.
19. Chernyshenko also failed to lure any European club to KHL’s casino economy, so his biggest catch was Chinese Kunlun Red Star, a political move overseen by both Putin and Xi Jinping, as a pretext to create a competitive “Chinese” team for Beijing 2022.
20. Aside from misusing the IIHF’s eligibility regulations leading up to the Olympics, the Kunlun team was a fiasco, sportively as well as financially.
21. During these crazy years, several Russian hockey people asked why the league invests billions in foreign clubs instead of investing in Russian hockey and their clubs. But these voices were hardly heard.
22. Although hockey today is irrelevant, a result of this senseless war could be that the KHL stops this expansion madness, the burning of money, and gives Russian hockey back to the hockey people. /end
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