Iliyan Filipov, the majority shareholder and owner of Botev Plovdiv, a Bulgarian first division football club, was shot dead on the evening of Tuesday, September 29, on the outskirts of Sofia. Bulgarian police immediately opened an investigation, while the incident has highlighted a disturbing scenario that has directly involved the oldest club in Bulgaria that is still active, restoring links to Eastern European organized crime and its infiltration into football.
Iliyan Filipov, the transport billionaire who saved Botev Plovdiv
Founder and managing director of PIMK, one of the most important transport and logistics giants in Eastern Europe, Iliyan Filipov was one of the key figures of entrepreneurship in Plovdiv, to the point that he consolidated his connection with the city by taking ownership of Botev, the oldest football club in Bulgaria, founded in 1912. In 2020, the turning point came: Filipov designed the revival of Botev, first by investing in the reconstruction of the stadium and then, in 2023, by officially becoming its majority shareholder. Under his presidency, the club returned to high levels, winning its fourth National Cup a year later and returning to the European Cups.
The "Koleza" affair: the stadium requested by Filipov that revived the club
The reconstruction of the Plovdiv stadium was the “key” to Filipov’s sporting success. For almost a decade, work on the facility had been suspended, while the club was on the verge of bankruptcy, mired in debt. The modernization and inauguration in just three years of the “Hristo Botev” stadium, or “Koleza”, as it is called by its fans, enabled the club’s final revival in football terms, returning it to the top of the Bulgarian first division.
The Shadow of the "Mutris": the tragic tradition of assassinated presidents
Unfortunately, the events of Tuesday, September 29, have once again plunged Botev Plovdiv and, with it, the entire Bulgarian football community into fear of new criminal intrusions into the sport, as had already happened in the 1990s and early 2000s. When the “Mutrits”, the bosses of the Bulgarian mafia, used football as a tool for power and money laundering, often ending up in the dark chronicles. Before Filipov, in Plovdiv, Nikolai Popov and Georgi Iliev were actually murdered in 2005, two of the main managers of Lokomotiv, the city’s other team. Two decades later, the shadow of organized crime has returned and investigations are revealing new infiltrations into the world of football.
