Facebook users disseminated a video of Nika Gvaramia on social media (links 1, 2). In the video, the founder of the political party “Ahali” and the former Director General of Mtavari Arkhi designates Georgian football as shameful and mortifying.
Nika Gvaramia’s speech is accompanied by footage of the Georgia-Portugal match at the European Football Championship to create a wrong context, as if the words, “the loser of the year, mortified, shameful and unfortunate Georgian football, which lost everything and with everyone, which missed all kinds of historical chances and instead of asking the authorities for an answer, Georgian football officials beat the fans” were used by Gvaramia to describe the performance of the Georgian national team at the 2024 championship.
In reality, he delivered the speech in the summary broadcast of “Mtavari Aktsentebi” in 2020. In a special broadcast, the former Director General of the “Mtavari Arkhi” named 10 nominations and 10 winners. Among them, he spoke about the failure of Georgian football in 2020 (see the full recording from 23:26). Presumably, his criticism resulted from the fact that the team won only 2 matches in the qualification stage of Euro 2020 and received the penultimate 4th place.
Thus, the speech made by Nika Gvaramia on air was not related to the efforts of the Georgian national team in 2024, but to the events of 2020.
