MOSCOW — Over the course of a 10-year career, Boris Rotenberg played so little that, outside his soccer club's dressing room, he was known only for his famous last name. But now the Dynamo Moscow right back finds himself the talk of Russian soccer after a series of unassuming starts caused a national scandal.

Rotenberg's father is Boris Rotenberg (senior), one of Russia's richest men, with a fortune estimated by Forbes at just under $1 billion. He also happens to be Dynamo's president. Both he and his brother Arkady boast close relationships with Russian President Vladimir Putin, dating back to childhood, when they learned judo together in postwar St. Petersburg. The brothers have earned vast fortunes, largely from government contracts, since Putin came to power in 2000, and were placed on U.S. and EU sanctions lists last year for their alleged roles as his "cronies."

But they've remained largely behind the scenes. Now a very public spat over Boris Rotenberg's career has become the latest scandal to hit Russian soccer as the country prepares to host the 2018 World Cup. With corruption allegations still swirling over Russia's winning bid — which was spearheaded by Putin personally — the furor over something as ostensibly minor as Rotenberg's run of games shows that personal interests and political connections may still count more here than fair play.

"You have the owner of the team and you have his son, who's not really doing the right thing with his life but doesn't want to admit that to himself," Yuri Dud, editor of the popular Sports.ru website, told BuzzFeed News. "It's more typical of an Asian country. But Russia today is more Asia than Europe."

After 10 years on the bench, Rotenberg's five starts at right back for Dynamo in the last few weeks have sown chaos in the team's ranks. When coach Stanislav Cherchesov surprisingly dropped Russian national team defender Alexei Kozlov for a key match against Lokomotiv Moscow, the teams played to a 2–2 draw that dented Dynamo's chances to qualify for the lucrative Champions League. Russian media reported that Igor Denisov, the team's captain, flew into such a rage at Cherchesov over his decision to play Rotenberg that he was dropped from the team and put up for transfer.

"I play as much as I'm allowed — the main thing is to help the team. The coach decides how much I get to play," Rotenberg told the Sovetsky Sport newspaper after a recent game.

Russian soccer has weathered a number of scandals in the run-up to the 2018 World Cup. Corruption allegations over Russia's winning bid, spearheaded by Putin personally, were whitewashed in a report by FIFA, the sport's governing body. Top officials dismiss the racist chanting that frequently mars games as insignificant. The national team's coach went several months without pay before an oligarch stumped up the cash in February.

Rotenberg's run in the Dynamo team appears more to reflect a pattern already tried and tested in Russia's economy, which is heavily dominated by a small number of massive state corporations. The sons of a tight-knit group of former KGB officers widely believed to form Putin's inner circle have all risen to management positions in major state-owned banks despite what campaigners say is a lack of obvious qualifications other than their last names. Petr Fradkov, son of the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service, even replaced one of his father's colleagues as deputy head of Russia's state-run Vnesheconombank in January after Alexander Ivanov, whose father, Sergei, is head of Putin's presidential administration, drowned while on vacation last year. Putin's youngest daughter, Ekaterina, was recently discovered to be in charge of a major state project to clone Silicon Valley.

"It's not so much nepotism as neo-feudalism. They've built a system whereby the fathers control the politics and the children control the business side," Alexei Navalny, a leading Russian opposition figure and anticorruption campaigner, told BuzzFeed News. "If the son is appointed deputy head of the bank, people understand that he's been appointed by a higher power and you can't get rid of him."