Meet Pafos, beginners whose owner “wants to win the Champions League”

Years before Pafos won the Cypriot League – not to mention the Champions League – the Roman owner Dubov had hung photos of the Bernabeu, Stamford Bridge and some other emblematic stages on the walls of their training center.

The message, repeated to the employees who were there and to whom Dubov was trying to recruit, was: we will play it one day.

“F ***. These guys are really ambitious,” was the reaction of Chef Scout Rodolfo Vaz, who weighed if he had to join the club when he saw the photos.

Weird ambitions are not uncommon for ambitious football clubs. However, few of them reach these objectives.

But the Pafos have. After having qualified for the Champions League proper for the first time in their history, beating Maccabi Tel Aviv, Dynamo Kyiv and, finally, Crvena Zvezda in a dramatic way through a goal of the 89th minute, they were attracted to some of the giants they have always faced.

Their first match was against European pillars Olympiacos. But the biggest fish are ahead: they will go to Juventus in December and Chelsea in January. But above all that, they welcome Bayern Munich – Harry Kane, Luiz Diaz, Joshua Kimmich and all – Tuesday.

It will be the biggest game in the history of the club. But then again, they had a lot. “It’s incredible because every month, every week, you have the most important game in the history of the club,” explains Vaz.

This is partly because there are not many history: PAFOS are technically only 11 years old. The club that exists today was trained in 2014 from the merger of two teams – AEK KOUKLIA and AEP PAPHOS – The latter is also due to a merger in 2000. They spent their first years floating between the two main Cypriot football divisions before being taken up by total sporting investments (TSI), led by Dubov, in 2017.

“When I arrived in Pafos for the first time, the idea was simple,” explains Dubov Athletics. “To build something that would last. Not only does a football team, but a football and sustainable business project. Cyprus offers sun, passion and mad football football, and there was the opportunity to create a professional and competitive club whose city could really be proud. ”

It took a little time to do things well. The first years of Dubov’s mandate presented a series of lower / medium finishes, and they have succeeded 10 head coaches in six years, including former Scottish defender Steven Pressley, Michel Salgado, Henning Berg, Cameron Toshack (John’s son) and the coach of the globetting companion Stephen Constantine.

Then, things seemed to click when they recruited Juan Carlos Carcedo in 2023. Carcedo had a modest record as a manager, his greatest success being the promotion of the second Spanish level with Ibiza, but his pedigree comes from the 15 years he spent as assistant from Unai Emery.

“We wanted something fresh,” said Pafos director general, Charis Theochaous, who says that it was this experience with Emery in Sevilla, Paris Saint-Germain and Arsenal who attracted them to him. “We wanted someone who would grow up with us.”

The first season under Carcedo was from top to bottom, but ended with them winning the Cypriot Cup. In her second, they won the Cypriot League for the very first time, finishing seven points away from the Champions of 2023 Aris Limassol and a huge 29 in front of title holders and 29 Apoel winners.

This brought them to the second round of qualification for the Champions League, where they beat Maccabi Tel Aviv on the total. Then, Dynamo Kyiv, which was processed relatively easily, but the biggest test came in the round of the playoffs, the last obstacle, against Crvena Zvezda: Pafos won the first leg at Belgrade 2-1, but the Serbian visitors took an advance of 1-0 in the 89th minute of the return match. The additional time has signaled, the penalties were profiled, but blew up the Brazilian winger Jaja to lob in a dramatic equalizer at night and the winner on a par.

“The emotions were crazy,” said the defender, and the man of the match in this Olympiacos match, Derrick Luckassen, with the sigh of a man who has never completely experienced like that before. “If you go to the qualification tour of the Champions League as a club like Pafos, you do not think that you will really go so far. It’s a dream if you can get there. But we deserve to be in the Champions League.”

These are only the third Cypriot team to do, after the Anorthose Famagusta and Apoel (the latter reached the quarter-finals in 2012), but these two are compared giants. To repeat how much the history of Pafos is modest, the greatest success among the clubs that merged to train them was some second division titles. It would be a bit like Hull City merging with Huddersfield Town, then merging with Sheffield on Wednesday, then winning the Premier League.

Maybe it overestimates a little. This is not exactly a story of the fairy tale oppressed: the PAFOs have received significant investments and recruited players from afar – including the former Chelsea, Paris Saint -Germain and the defender of Brazil David Luiz – but they insist that their budget is comparable to other clubs in Cyprus.

They play their home games at Limassol’s home because their own stadium Stelios Kyriakides did not meet the demanding standards of UEFA to host matches. But work is already underway to improve their facilities, including a block of apartments on site so that their young players can stay.

And recruiting players is not as easy as offering them a lot of money. Cyprus is generally not considered among the most attractive leagues, and wages are a problem. “It is extremely difficult to bring a player of quality of his good age,” explains Theochaous. “For a quality player, we are not always the choice for them. We are not in the best world championship.”

Luiz is an aberrant value in terms of player profile: their other permanent signatures this summer came from Türkiye, the second Brazilian level and the Ajax bench. They apply a hybrid recruitment approach that combines old -fashioned screening (after talking, Vaz Hops on a plane for the World Cup under 20 in Chile) and data, and start to prioritize the Hot Low model, sells a high model that has made so many smaller clubs. “We must also try to sell players, so a new player can see that there is a real path to be sold in a more advanced championship,” explains Theochaous.

A Trump card they have is the lifestyle in Cyprus: a player who has an offer of pafos and another club in Dis Letnsons, a less attractive place, will often be convinced by the landscape, the sun and the rhythm of life on the festival of the eastern Mediterranean.

They are also persistent. They called Luckassen around a dozen times, trying to make him join. “I went to speak with them and they had a whole project planned,” he said, “and they wanted me to do so badly. So I said to myself, if the club wants you so bad, maybe you should do it. ”

“We are also a club that pays in time,” explains Theochaous, which is the kind of thing that should probably not be used as a boastful, but for the teams outside the big leagues, it is not a fact.

Pafos fans support their team in a qualification game in Belgrade (Srdjan Stevanovic / Getty Images)

Behind all of this is Dubov. Born in Hungary in a Russian family but a British citizen since 1999, Dubov is CEO of TSI, a group with a large portfolio that takes Esports sports, artificial intelligence, Padel and a range of other concerns. At one point, it was almost a multi-club property group: Dubov was on the board of directors of FC Riga in Latvia until 2017 and was more informally involved in the Russian side of Rodina Moscow, but Pafos is its only current involvement in football.

Those who have a passionate memory can remember that Dubov was a member of a group that briefly owned Portsmouth, at the end of the 2000s / early 2010s, when the English club was barely spending a year without changing owners. Dubov was one of the conversation sports initiatives, alongside Vladimir Antonov, a Russian businessman, later imprisoned for his role in banking fraud of several million dollars.

Dubov had no connection with these crimes, but that clearly informs part of his answer when I ask what he learned from this experience: “I learned the importance of choosing your partners carefully.”

“Always and above all, these are people,” he says, when I ask what he attributes the success of Pafos. “The good coaches, the players who are engaged in the project, the staff who work tirelessly day and night, and the fans who support us whatever happens. Success does not come from an individual; It is achieved when everyone is moving together. We recruit our staff in the best clubs around the world, including Benfica, Udinese, Valence, Porto and Atletico Madrid, as well as Brazil, among others. ”. ».

The day after Pafos won his opening match in the league phase against Olympiacos, 0-0, I sent a message to Dubov to say what a good result it was. One point, against a more established team, in their very first match in the Champions League, despite a man sent after 25 minutes: I thought it was a very good result. “It was not the result we wanted,” comes the answer. I relate this to Vaz and Theochaous, and they both start laughing before they have a chance to tell them what was Dubov’s answer. They have heard it.

“If you ask Roman, he wants to win the Champions League,” says Vaz.

Among the crowd for the Bayern match this evening will be Nikos Christudoulides, the president of Cyprus and a big fan of Pafos. Does the head of the country present the present exert additional pressure? “I certainly hope that it is, at least for the players,” explains Dubov. “When the president is in the stands, you don’t want your attacker to be lacking two meters. But honestly, this is an excellent sign. This shows that Pafos becomes an important part of the community. ”

PAFOS will not win the Champions League. Winning one of their eight league phase games would be a success. Going closer to qualifications for direct elimination towers (the teams with 11 points managed this season) would be amazing. But in the minds of those of the club, they are not only happy to be here.

“We want to make noise,” says Theochaous. “We have already made noise and we want to make even more noise on the biggest scene. We may no longer have this opportunity. ”

(Top Photo: Srdjan Stevanovic / Getty Images)