Ukrainian players, Building a Stadium


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July 4th 2006
Published: July 4th 2006
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Kaunas StadiumKaunas StadiumKaunas Stadium

Kaunas Stadium
I learned that Vikingas, one of the teams from Vilnius, has two Ukrainians on their team, one of them being the pitcher we faced that day. According to Sigitas, they have six paid players on the team. One paid player they acquired from another Vilnius Club, another from Utena (a city two hours away). In both cases the guys were on teams that did not have money to pay players.
Sigitas did not how much they were paid, simply that they were paid. When I asked him how they could afford to pay six players, he explained to me that of all the teams in Lithuania without a home field, Vikingas was closest to getting one. They owned land in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, which is hard to come by, and Sigitas thinks that corporate sponsors are funding the team in hopes of gaining access to the land to use/build. The land they own is prime real estate, apparently.
Meanwhile in Kaunas they are having their own difficulties in acquiring land/funding to build a stadium. The club has a 50-year lease from the City of Kaunas on land adjacent to the current stadium where they play games. The current stadium is owned by the school nearby, and will not allow them to change the stadium at all—which is why it is a dump. Teenagers come there to drink/smoke, there is regular vandalism at the stadium. Any time they try to clean it up, it doesn’t last long. This is their dilemma (ironically the school rarely uses the facility except on the rare occasion that individuals use it for recreation).
There had been plans to push for funding to build on the leased land, but that recently has stalled because of a private land claim. The land was acquired from Russia when Lithuanian independence was declared, but more recently an individual has claimed ownership of the land from pre-Soviet times. There is right now a dispute between the city and the private interest over who has rights to the land.
What is even more frustrating is that the land being claimed by the individual is only ¼ to ½ an acre, and a chunk right in the middle of the land on which they were planning to build the stadium. So for now, Kaunas has to make do with their make-shift field at the old soccer stadium.



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