Roman Rotenberg got everything and a little more in SKA

To understand why this is all for Roman Rotenberg, it’s worth starting from his childhood. His first sport was judo, almost a family affair. But in 1991, the Rotenbergs moved to Helsinki, and here 10-year-old Roman first got acquainted with hockey. The game was captivating, but finding a team was not easy due to age.

“We found a team, it was far to go, but everything started spinning,” Roman Rotenberg said in an interview with RIA Novosti. – I understood that I didn’t have enough skating, because I started late, the guys skated better than me, and I had to catch up with them. And there was such an opportunity – there were public skating rinks, and I spent all my free time there, I liked it. By the age of 15, I had already begun to catch up and overtake everyone, because I myself trained for 6 hours. We practiced 3-4 times a week. Then I got to college, where in the mornings there were ice training, then school, education, in the evening with the team – gym, ice.

Peers and even some coaches of opponents called Roman “hare” during the matches. Now he recalls this with a laugh, but at that time such situations infuriated him.

At the age of 19, I had to make a choice: hockey or further study. Roman himself wanted to continue playing hockey. Mom insisted on education. There was a quarrel, as a result of which in 1999 Roman Rotenberg was nevertheless sent to study in England. The year before, Father Boris Rotenberg had returned to Russia.

The influence of the Rotenberg family grew rapidly. In 2002, they became the owners of SMP Bank, in 2003, Gazprom’s subcontractor Gaztaged, and in 2008, another company, Stroygazmontazh, acquired five construction companies from Gazprom for $400 million.

After completing his studies in London, in 2006 Roman Rotenberg returned to Russia. As he himself told in 2013 in an interview with the Finnish publication Helsingin Sanomat, his father helped him organize an interview with Alexander Medvedev, CEO of Gazprom Export (now the president of Zenit). Roman Rotenberg repeatedly emphasized that no one gave him any guarantees and that the interview itself did not mean anything. So he became Medvedev’s assistant for external communications – not at all what he was taught in England. But Roman Rotenberg and Medvedev discovered one passion – hockey. Two years later, Medvedev became the first president of the Continental Hockey League, and Roman Rotenberg headed KHL Marketing, where he was finally able to put his knowledge into practice. And only after that he came to SKA.

In 2011, Gennady Timchenko headed the board of the SKA club and asked Roman Rotenberg to become responsible for marketing.

“Then everyone in St. Petersburg was talking only about Zenit,” Rotenberg recalled in the same article Helsingin Sanomat. — We have completely changed SKA’s media strategy, right down to the brand logo. Now SKA’s cash flow is the best in the KHL. If five years ago 4,000 people came to the match, now the number of spectators is 12,000.

Gradually, the influence of Roman Rotenberg in SKA grew. And although for a long time he continued to be formally responsible for marketing, in fact he carried out full-fledged operational management of the club. You have to understand that SKA has always been the richest club in the KHL, but only in the seventh season of the league did the army team from the Neva become champions. And this happened three years after joining the Rotenberg club. In 2017, the success was repeated. Against this background, Roman’s influence grew in the Russian Ice Hockey Federation. There was a trend: the head coach of SKA immediately became the head coach of the Russian national team.

According to Fontanka, since 2014, Roman Rotenberg has been solving not only managerial tasks. He is increasingly immersed in the work of the coaching staff, in the development and preparation of players. To participate in the Olympics in Pyeongchang, 15 hockey players from the St. Petersburg team were called up to the Russian team, which was already headed by SKA head coach Oleg Znarok. Even CSKA during the Soviet era did not always have such representation in the national team. According to sources, Roman Rotenberg, as the head of the coaching staff, planned to prepare the players for the most important starts of the four-year period, which ended in victory for the Russian team.

After that, the coaches in SKA, and after it in the national team, began to mysteriously change every year – Oleg Znarok, Alexei Kudashov, Ilya Vorobyov, Valery Bragin. The coaching ambitions of Roman Rotenberg were increasingly spoken publicly. Many former and even current SKA players said that the vice-president of the club takes part in training.

For the first time, Roman Rotenberg took the coaching bridge on September 23, 2020, when almost the entire team and staff fell ill with covid. Many expected that the youth team of SKA, in which even 16-year-olds played, would fail, but in reality the army team played only one game, and then tied with Ak Bars and brought 5 out of 6 points from the road.

Then it turned out that back in 2019, Roman Rotenberg received a diploma of the eleventh graduation of the Higher School of Coaches of the Siberian State University of Physical Culture and Sports.

This is how the head of the educational institution Dmitry Bernatavichyus recalled the student in an interview with Sport24:

“He is a man of genius in his own way, very educated. First of all, this is a person who is sick of hockey. He is very charged and he likes this sport very much. The most important thing is that he is purposeful and learns, wants to develop further. You understand, it was possible to stop, not to study further. Many of us do this: they don’t study, they don’t want to develop further, they sit, watch what is happening, and believe that they know everything. And this person, it seems to me, wants to learn and develop further.”

“I have been in hockey all my life,” Roman Rotenberg himself explained in October 2020 in an interview with Fontanka about his unexpected appearance as an SKA coach. – For the last five years, I have been completely immersed in the work of the SKA headquarters. I did not go to the coaching bridge, maybe I was not visible, but this does not mean that I was not ready to do the work now, which, in fact, we have been doing all together over the past five seasons both in SKA and in the team. Of course, when you directly start these duties, the sensations are completely different. It’s like driving a fighter jet or a Formula 1 car, where you have to make quick decisions and know every button by heart. Before my coaching debut, I knew all these “buttons”. I was ready for this process thanks to all my life experience.

In the same interview, a Fontanka correspondent asked him if he was ready one day to become the head coach of SKA, to which Roman Rotenberg replied: “Never say never.”

From the very beginning of the 2021/22 season, Roman Rotenberg had already fully taken his place on the coaching bench and never left. On January 4, the status of SKA head coach was officially assigned to him.

“Over the past month, we have tried the option when Roman Borisovich serves as the head coach, and it all worked, there is a result,” explained the now former head coach of SKA Valery Bragin. – Therefore, it was decided to consolidate this state of affairs and formally. I will continue to work as a head coach.

If everything is really as Bragin says, then there really is a result: after a record losing streak, SKA managed to return to first place in the Western Conference, even with players who have never played at such a level.

For everyone who follows the club, it is obvious that all the key decisions in the team, both in the preparatory phase and during the games, have long been made by Roman Rotenberg. By and large, the board of directors of SKA brought the formal side to the actual one. Note that the board includes Gennady Timchenko, Alexander Medvedev, Viktor Kruchinin, Alexander Dyukov, Vyacheslav Tyurin and Roman Rotenberg himself.

It is possible that Roman Rotenberg fulfilled his childhood dream: he did not become a hockey player because of his mother’s decision, but now he leads one of the best hockey teams in Russia. At the same time, we must remember that the position of head coach brings with it a higher responsibility for the result. It is the head coach who is responsible for both success and failure. We don’t know yet what the career of coach Roman Rotenberg will turn out to be, but in any case, this is a historical case.