Former head coach of Spartak Dmitry Alenichev believes that the Moscow club lacked such specialists as the Portuguese Tomas Amaral.

On Friday, Spartak announced the appointment of Amaral to the post of sports director. The Portuguese will start work on January 1. In this position, he will replace the Englishman Paul Ashworth, who will take the post of technical director of Spartak.

— I don’t know Amaral. But Benfica, and other Portuguese clubs, are selling players for 50, 80 million (euro)… They sold João Felix for almost 120 million! This suggests that the sports director worked perfectly.

Yes, Amaral was a scout for Benfica. Nevertheless. He knows this work. I think that Amaral’s arrival is a very good acquisition. Because Spartak can sign good players. In my opinion, Spartak lacked such people, one of the main ones in sports,” Alenichev was quoted as saying by the Championship.

Spartak finished the first part of the MIR RPL season in fifth place in the standings, gaining 30 points. The gap between the “red-whites” and the leading “Krasnodar” is eight points.

Watch live broadcasts of MIR RPL matches on the Match TV and MATCH PREMIER channels, as well as on the websites sportbox.ru and matchtv.ru.