We cannot have different rules for Magnus Carlsen, his behaviour not worthy of a great champion: FIDE CEO Emil Sutovsky

The World Junior Chess Championship has lost some of its sheen over the years, with many eligible players not featuring in it. D. Gukesh, at 18 the World champion for the grown-ups, could compete in two more junior events if he wants to. But when Emil Sutovsky won the World junior title in 1996, it was more prestigious, and chess wasn’t this insanely young.

Sutovsky went on to achieve a career-high ranking of No. 17 and was among the world’s top players for years. He is now an administrator. He was world chess governing body FIDE’s director general from 2018 to 2022. For the last two years, he has been its CEO. Excerpts from an interview:

FIDE is in the news for the wrong reasons of late, with World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen lashing out against the organisation during the recent World Rapid and Blitz Championships in New York. He was disqualified for violating the dress code and he threatened not to play in any more FIDE events.

I think that it was not a behaviour worthy of a great champion. And I can hardly imagine this happening in any other sport, say tennis for instance. I don’t think Federer, Nadal or Djokovic would do something like that. There were several branches of attack from him, and all of them were quite shocking. He claimed that Vishy Anand was unfit for his role [as FIDE deputy president] and he attacked the chief arbiter, which was quite extraordinary and not a good example at all.

For me, as the CEO of the federation, it was most important that the event should still run smoothly and that we should have all the best players. About the dress code, everyone was following the regulation and everybody knew it in advance. Other top players like Ian Nepomniachtchi and Hikaru Nakamura followed it. Nepomniachtchi may have made a humorous comment, but he complied with the rule.

In general, in today’s world, when you have a conflict between a great sportsman and the institution, any institution, there are many people who would back the athlete no matter what, because he is a great star and so on. And then you have a problem, because we at FIDE, we cannot have a different set of rules for Magnus and for all the rest.

Yet, FIDE allowed Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi to share the World blitz title, which the rules did not quite permit.

Well, at the moment when the proposal from Magnus came, it was a bit weird, but at the same time, I didn’t feel it was something outrageous. What I found disturbing later on was that they were discussing that they might keep making draws. If it were my decision, probably I would decide differently.

Back in 2004, you had played at the Pune Super GM tournament in India. Chess in India has come a long way since.

I remember [Liviu-Dieter] Nisipeanu started playing really well. I ended up close to the bottom. But otherwise, I have good memories about the tournament. There were a lot of exciting games.

I am not surprised by the huge strides India has made in chess. If anything, I was surprised that that Indian generation couldn’t make it that far to follow Anand’s footsteps. Because I always saw a lot of potential in players like Krishnan Sasikiran and P. Harikrishna.

Maybe they were a bit short of opportunities.

Yes, they just didn’t have these small things that could make a huge difference at the end of the day. But this younger generation, when it started four or five years ago, it was immediately evident that they were going to be special. And everyone has a sponsor. And that helps. Once you don’t need to think about basically earning money, you just can focus on your play. That makes a big difference.

But I would say that India should not be over-relaxed on that because this generation is very strong. But at present, I don’t really see top Indian players who would be 15, 16, 17. This is a golden generation, but India shouldn’t relax. The onus is on the Indian federation and sponsors to support and to promote new players who are probably now five or eight years old to be the next big thing.

And I would like to see more private companies coming forward to sponsor chess tournaments. We see India as an important host of major chess events. There could be two big global events that India would be conducting this year.

So as FIDE’s CEO, what are your goals?

I think we are sort of ready for some sort of a breakthrough. We are a huge game, but we are not a huge sport yet. So how we become a huge sport, that’s my task. Our prize funds are much higher. Financially our situation is better than ever. We are increasing our budget, but we are not for profit. The budget we redistribute it to the chess community. We have so many educational programmes, social programmes for chess development.

But we have to get on to the most important TV networks. It was good that big companies like Google have become the presenting sponsors [of the World Championship in Singapore].

It was also important that we went to Wall Street [for the World Rapid Championship]. And America is an important continent for chess. From what we see from the numbers, India and America are two countries which have a lot of potential still.

I don’t see chess getting on TV in India yet. I think that’s the next major step. And I’m looking very much to team up with someone who would believe in the potential of chess. We are not worse than kabaddi! We have young audiences. It’s very important. Chess audience is young.

And chess is probably the most ideal game for the digital space.

Of course, it is. I think we did a wonderful job during the pandemic.

It is perhaps the only game that grew during the pandemic.

Yes, we created the Online Olympiad, Nations Cup… so many tournaments, you know. I think we are sort of reaping now with what we were sowing.