On a chilly November morning in Nyon, Switzerland, in the Ebbe Schwartz room of the House of European Football, the headquarters of UEFA, around two dozen men meet to discuss Russia’s football market.

They are senior figures from UEFA’s Club Financial Control Body (CFCB), the Russian Football Union, and arguably the biggest club in Russia, President Putin’s favourite team, FC Zenit Saint Petersburg.

The meeting is at the request of Jean-Luc Deheane, Belgium’s former prime minister and the head of the UEFA’s financial investigation team, who for the past few months has led a probe into Zenit’s finances; specifically, the nature of its lucrative sponsorship deals with its ultimate parent company, Gazprom.

Unlike almost every other club competing in European football, Zenit, one of the most successful teams in the Russian Premier League, is owned by a financial behemoth. Gazprom is Russia’s state energy company and it has annual revenues of over €100 billion. Practically, this gives it and Zenit near-limitless cash.

On this Tuesday morning of 12 November, 2013, Zenit’s general manager, executive and financial directors, and head of strategic planning are justifying why Gazprom pumped €113 million into the club’s coffers in 2012, a significant cheat of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules. These regulations place limits on club spending, debt levels and shareholder bailouts.

Zenit’s arguments to UEFA are uncomplicated, highlighting Russia’s poorer population and the inability of the national league to generate the revenues of their European counterparts. The technical and digital infrastructure is also weak, say club officials, and digital piracy is out of control. State subsidies are unavoidable.

“If [Russian Premier League] clubs are to comply with FFP requirements right now,” Zenit tells UEFA’s investigators, it means they will be forced to sell their best players. This will reduce “clubs’ competitiveness at the European arena,” and Russians will begin to turn away from football and towards ice hockey.

In one of the slides of its presentation titled 'Threats and Risks', Zenit delivers an ominous warning: “All these negative developments would happen on the eve of the 2018 World Cup,” in Russia.

The threat of disruption to the World Cup resonated with UEFA, it seems. Six months later, in May 2014, the investigative chamber settled the case against Zenit through a secret agreement that allowed the club to avoid exclusion from the Champions League.