Fiery entrepreneur and model Anamaria Prodan, who has been part of takeover negotiations and represented dozens of players as one of football's most glamorous owners and agents, has confessed she wants to take control again.
The 47-year-old, who has posed naked on the pages of Playboy Romania and loves posting scantily clad shots to more than 643,000 fans on Instagram, has already presided over clubs and been an agent for dozens of players, including former Chelsea badboy Adrian Mutu and Nicolae Stanciu, whose $11 million move to Saudi Arabian side Al-Ahli Saudi FC was brokered by Prodan last year.
Now she is being strongly linked with beleaguered Romanian top-level side FC Hermannstadt, who urgently need to pay player wage debts of around $750,000, and has hinted that her first move after the global pandemic subsides will be to buy a football club.
In between relaxing in outdoor swimming pools and pursuing her passion for high fashion, Prodan has played a role in the potential takeover of troubled Dinamo Bucharest, who played English Premier League champions Manchester City for a shot at reaching the Champions League four years ago but are currently languishing at the bottom of the country’s Liga I table.
Despite being married to ex-Romania midfielder Laurentiu Reghecampf, who spent years playing for Dinamo’s arch-rivals Steaua Bucharest and has managed the club twice, Prodan has said it is “a matter of time” before new owners pump money into Dinamo.
“It takes a lot of money, really,” she told Telekomsport. “It's not a game but someone will be found. It's hard for me to believe that fans can run a club like Dinamo.”
Former journalist and reality television star Prodan has called herself "the first woman who ever spoke about football" and been described as “the most controversial woman in Romania.”
Born to a wealthy family as the daughter of a singer, she was linked to mafia and underworld figures during her time as a journalist and was at the center of an alleged blackmail plot when impresario Dumitru Tudor was accused by police of demanding money from Prodan and Reghecampf in return for withholding compromising information.
She has also taken up key positions and been involved with at least six Romanian clubs, including serving as club president at FC Snagov, who withdrew from the league at the end of last year due to financial problems.
High-profile Prodan has been frustrated by the difficulties of keeping negotiations out of the media. “Every time it appears in the press that Dinamo is ready to be sold, that Spanish or Turkish or Arab investors are coming, then it's a great problem,” she complained.
“When all these things appear abroad, in all the sports newspapers, and you see reports that they argued and it wasn’t sold or there were problems, then no-one [wants to] get involved.”
Writing on Instagram, Prodan also accused the press of “speculations and lies” that “go unpunished.”
“In Romania, anyone can film you and write,” she said. “Private life is private and no-one on earth has the right to...do sh*t. But in this life everything comes back.”
The outspoken businesswoman has been angered by the attention focused on her three children, two of whom are from her nine-year marriage to former Romania basketball player Tiberiu Dumitrescu.
She has also lashed out at football bosses in Romania over plans to reduce wage bills while professional football in the country is suspended, calling them “incompetent” and questioning a wide range of legalities around their proposals for players and clubs in a series of furious social media rants.
Also on rt.com Aleksandra the ace! Russian Gymnast Soldatova serves up scorching tennis video in her UNDERWEAR (VIDEO)