Last Saturday, Zenit St Petersburg beat Arsenal Tula 3-0 to stretch their lead at the top of the Russian Premier League over Dynamo Moscow to five points. Dynamo, managed by the German Sandro Schwarz, needed a last-minute penalty to salvage a draw at home to Rostov, while in Nizhny Novgorod, the Italian coach Paolo Vanoli threw on Victor Moses at half-time as his Spartak Moscow side drew 1-1.
But this is another world now. Foreign involvement lingers, but these are games that feel as if they are happening in a different reality. There will almost certainly be no European football for Russian clubs next season. Spartak have been expelled from this season’s Europa League. Russia did not play their World Cup playoff against Poland on Thursday.
The Russian Football Union can take whatever action it wants at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, apply to host whatever tournaments, but it is largely academic given it seems unlikely that any but a handful of Uefa members would countenance games against Russian opponents even if the ban imposed on them were lifted.
When Russia invaded Ukraine there was an immediate exodus of foreign players and coaches. The German Markus Gisdol quit Lokomotiv Moscow after six months in charge. Daniel Farke hadn’t even overseen a game with Krasnodar before he felt compelled to resign. “We formed a great community with different nationalities in a very short time, who wanted to pursue sporting goals together – with joy and fun,” he said. “Unfortunately, the serious side of life has now caught up with us.”
While others remain – Zenit’s goals were scored by Brazilians, Malcom (two) and Yuri Alberto – slowly the serious side of life is catching up with everybody. A handful of players made awkward trips for international duty – Zenit’s Colombian midfielder Wilmar Barrios, for instance, travelled via Turkey and Panama for Thursday’s 3-0 win over Bolivia – but some may not return. Krasnodar have found their local airport closed to civil traffic and so have to make at least part of the journey for away games by rail – a significant consideration in a country as big as Russia.
Ukrainian players have been forced to leave, something Fifa has facilitated by an amendment to contract regulations. The defender Yaroslav Rakitskyi, dropped by Zenit after posting a pro-Ukraine message on Instagram, soon terminated his contract by mutual consent. Andriy Voronin, the former Liverpool striker, quit as assistant coach of Dynamo, but Anatoliy Tymoshchuk, Ukraine’s most-capped player, remains as assistant at Zenit despite being stripped of his coaching licence by the Ukrainian Association of Football.
Russians playing overseas have been broadly unaffected: Aleksei Miranchuk is still at Atalanta, despite playing alongside the Ukrainian Ruslan Malinovskyi; Aleksandr Golovin started Monaco’s 3-0 win over Paris Saint-Germain last week; Nikita Khaykin remains Bodø/Glimt’s first-choice keeper. But who now would sign for a Russian club? And what club would sign, or be able to sign, a Russian player?
Although all four FA Cup quarter-finals, the Clásico and the Superclásico could all be watched last weekend, the Premier League and Ligue 1 are no longer broadcast in Russia. It’s largely symbolic, but it only enhances a sense of isolation – and isolation in football, even before globalisation, has only ever led to regression. Argentina emerged from a decade of Peronist isolation to lose 6-1 to Czechoslovakia at the 1958 World Cup; even six years out of European competition post-Heysel set English football back significantly.
The trajectory for Russian football has been down for some time now. In 2005, CSKA Moscow, backed by Sibneft, became the first Russian side to win a major European trophy by lifting the Uefa Cup. Sibneft became Gazprom and shifted interest to Zenit, who won the competition in 2008. A month later, that side formed the core of a Russia national team that, playing thrilling football, beat the Netherlands to reach the semi-finals of the Euros. Russia, it seemed, was emerging as a major football nation.
There were other flurries of investment, most notably in 2011 when the billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, a close ally of Vladimir Putin who had borrowed billions of dollars from state banks to invest in Gazprom and the fertiliser producer Uralkali, bought Anzhi Makhachkala. He signed Samuel Eto’o, Roberto Carlos and Christopher Samba and appointed Guus Hiddink as coach, only be forced to slash the budget after Uralkali’s attempt to breakaway from a cartel of companies led to a collapse in the price of potash.
But Russia never had a better tournament than 2008 and their clubs never built on the successes of CSKA and Zenit. The Financial Fair Play regulations implemented in 2011 – at least in part as a reaction from the traditional elites against what Roman Abramovich had done at Chelsea – limited what even the richest oligarchs could achieve. But there is perhaps anyway a ceiling on what can be done with money alone, at least in the short-term. The very best players and the very best coaches still, by and large, preferred to live in western Europe and play for western European clubs.
In terms of the Uefa coefficient, the Russian league’s best season came in 2017-18, conveniently just before the World Cup – but that was essentially a technicality based on Europa League results. Interest had already begun to wane, while investment had been hit even by the limited sanctions that followed Russian incursions into Crimea and Donbas in 2014.
That was especially so at CSKA, whose long-term president, Evgeny Giner, had significant business interests in Ukraine. Perhaps Gazprom, its sponsorship of Uefa over, will invest domestically, but with the fall in the value of the rouble and sanctions biting, who in Russia now has money to spend on football?
In Russia there is a curious sense of suspension. There are no games for the national side this week but the league ticks on. The crash, though, is coming. Compared to what is happening in Ukraine, of course, that is an irrelevance, but football, as the most global of sports, perhaps serves as a case study for other aspects of Russian life. And the reality is that for now, and the immediate future, Russian football is over.
