Epress.am News from Armenia
Football Federation of Armenia President Ruben Hayrapetyan believes that “an Armenian man wouldn’t give his daughter to football [soccer].” He said as such at a press conference in Yerevan today, responding to a question about the situation of women’s football in the country.
“To have a championship, you need 3,000 players. We don’t have that many and never will. An Armenian man won’t allow his 8- or 10-year-old daughter to go and get hurt every day,” he said.
According to him, women’s football can develop gradually or on its own, but at this point the Federation’s attention is on men’s football. It’s not worth spending large sums of money on a sport that has no future, he said.
Hayrapetyan also noted that developing women’s football is FIFA’s and UEFA’s requirement, and the Football Federation of Armenia (FFA) is trying to do something about it, but “to make it the purpose of life, no.”
The man has to lead the family, Hayrapetyan continued, and Armenian men and women “shouldn’t be equal to each other.”
“You want to be a European man? No, [thank you], we don’t need it,” he said.
On the law adopted in parliament abolishing unemployment benefits, the FFA president said that the unemployment benefit “is a very bad thing.”
“Those benefits have made our people lazy,” he said.
On the matter of the Pak Shuka (“covered market”), which is owned by Republican Party of Armenia MP, oligarch, and Hayrapetyan’s friend Samvel Aleksanyan, the FFA president said no one would make a fuss if the market belonged not to a Republican Party of Armenia member, but to another party member — for example, to a representative of the Prosperous Armenia Party or Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun).
Asked about the case involving an incident in the restaurant complex Harsnaqar, which he owns, Hayrapetyan said he didn’t want to talk about “those bastards,” referring to the accused, who, in Jun. 2012, beat to death military doctors, one of whom, Vahe Avetyan, died 12 days later. According to documents submitted in court, the accused were security guards working at Harsnaqar.