Sportbox.ru columnist Roman Trushechkin formulates five questions before the new season of the Russian championship.
Last season in Russia turned out to be unusual due to a sharp change in its conditions in the midst of the tournament. The new season is already starting in a changed environment. He will have to answer not only those questions that are repeated from year to year, but also completely new ones that address the very foundations of our championship.
Zenit is already a champion?
Yes, if you agree that nowhere else is Zenit building an antipode team with comparable power and scope. No, if you pay attention to how Zenit itself is concerned about maintaining and strengthening its dominant position in the league.
Zenit is a clear, time-tested force. The flaws in the composition either do not last long, until a strong player is bought to strengthen the position, or they are carefully masked.
Until the case, that is, the ball, reaches the “thin hands” of the goalkeeper Odoevsky, he will already be blown away and safe in the conditions of the Russian championship: Lukaku is not playing for us. With two newcomers from Sochi, Zenit not only strengthens two key positions in the team that suffered from losses, but also, perhaps, removes Sochi itself from among the title contenders – a repeat of the silver finish for Garanin’s team is no longer guaranteed.
On the one hand, Zenit has no competitors in the country in terms of composition and capabilities. On the other hand, Zenit has to somehow live with this knowledge. The team that has gathered the most strong players in its league has no other options than the championship. And he will not find excuses for himself if he does not take the title.
A rich composition must be able to manage. Once, Zenit already had to deal with internal bust, releasing players on loan. So, in fact, a strong Sochi appeared. But this happened in the same environment, when there were European competitions and the opportunity to load a larger number of players with practice.
Photo: © Dmitry Chelyapin / Match TV
Where to get motivation if there are no European cups?
Here you need to immediately make a reservation: European cups as an incentive did not work for everyone before. We have clubs that have either never played in UEFA competitions, or played in such a way that they prefer not to remember it. For them, nothing has changed.
But how exactly does the “motivation by European competitions” work for those who aspire to and get into them? If a team has the ability to win a championship, it will use it for its own sake, and not because the championship opens the door to the Champions League. That is, it is inconceivable that such a team would say: we can fight for gold and take it, but we don’t want to and we won’t fight, because we won’t be allowed into European competitions anyway. The same principle works on all other steps of the table.
There are simply no teams that do not want to rise higher inside the official tournament, without any external incentives. Eurocups arose later than the national championships, in which the internal struggle for superiority existed from the very beginning, and they took advantage of the sweetest fruits of this struggle – the leading clubs. Therefore, the national championship can neither be an annex to the European competitions, nor a “qualifying competition” for them. National championships are self-sufficient, and sometimes it’s time to remember this.
Okay, we remembered. But what exactly should we do next in Russia? We have very poorly realized the potential of internal intrigues. Any match has its springs of interest, they need to be found and squeezed. They exist in two important forms: statistics and human intersections. In order to collect interesting numbers and track fates, it would be useful for clubs to have special staff members, club statisticians, and here you can safely use the experience of English teams. Such people work there and publish very cheerful materials on club sites.
The parallel path is conditionally the “path of the trash talk”. Thanks to Spartak and Zenit, a phenomenon from the world of professional boxing has taken strong roots in Russian football. The exchange of inventive barbs in the media environment has become a stable genre, which clearly has considerable potential. Over time, victory on the football field will no longer be perceived as complete if you have not defeated your opponent on the field of video content and memes. Therefore, all our clubs need to learn to behave more defiantly.
How are clubs adapting to the sudden departures of foreign players?
Lokomotiv could, in the common interest, disclose the details of the agreement that it concludes with its foreigners. What obligations do they give to the club and under what conditions? They must be tied to the calculations with the players: devotion to the emblem with a green diesel locomotive determines the completeness and regularity of payments. But for this, the club must have a mechanism to protect against lawsuits, and the agreements themselves can only be legally binding.
But the main way to adapt to the suspension of contracts should be simply to be ready for this suspension every minute. Our clubs now have to live only today, not thinking about tomorrow.
When Miodrag Božović calls the fugitives traitors and adds that they won’t earn that kind of money anywhere, he hardly means absolute amounts. You can earn more in other places, the question is different: how much do you actually have to work for this money – here and there? Apparently, less effort is spent here for the same money. For us, this is a sign of a difficult fork in the road: to continue to remain a country to which legionnaires will come for a “northern allowance”, rush with them, blowing off dust particles, worry if they suddenly leave?
Or increase the intensity of the training process (find photos of Tottenham stars passing out during Antonio Conte’s training sessions) to the point where Russian money no longer seems so easy to visitors? Yes, it will scare away some of them already at the entrance. For someone, a visit to Russia, where you also need to plow, will become completely unattractive. But perhaps it will be useful for the rest – those who have already come to us and those who were born here, live and play football?
Is the sports principle violated for clubs from cities with closed airports?
So they think in Rostov, perhaps in Krasnodar and Voronezh. They are silent in Sochi, although today’s air route there from Moscow through Kazakhstan is still a test for an aching back. Yes, any departure for a club with a closed airport is an embarrassment. But in a rhythmic calendar without European competition, these clubs make such a trip once every two weeks.
And take, for example, the October calendar of Lokomotiv. Yes, we don’t know yet whether the current air travel regime will continue then, but it looks like this: in the 12th round, railway workers fly in a roundabout way across the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea and back, and from rounds 13 to 15 they have three derbies in a row: “ Torpedo, Dynamo, CSKA. And what about Spartak, which starts the season with a difficult double departure Grozny-Krasnodar? And a little later in August, after, probably, a bus trip to Voronezh, playing with Zenit? Talk about violating the sports principle begins to play with other colors.
Photo: © Denis Bushkovsky / Match TV
It is also not easy for clubs to whose cities planes fly. Although the very composition of the participants in the Premier League 2022/23 seems to be talking about the adaptation of the tournament to logistical challenges.
Torpedo returned and with its season should answer the question: where have they been for these eight years? For the first time since 2014, five capital teams will play in the top division. Add Khimki to them, and you get the very notorious “Moscow Championship”, which is periodically teased by our troubled regional representatives of the Premier League.
It is bad when the league pupates around the ruling center of the country. But bad – in normal times. For the current complex, this, paradoxically, is a boon. A freezing person draws his legs to his chest and covers them with his hands, so there is more chance to keep warm. The Premier League, which in this year’s difficult conditions is shrinking to the championship of the ancient Moscow kingdom, will have an easier time surviving. And when it warms up, it will definitely stretch in all directions.
Who will go to football?
Fans who are ready to put their whole life on the map of their hobby have always drawn a line between themselves and those who come to the stadium on major holidays. They were ready for inconvenience and deprivation and were proud of it. But as soon as the next inconvenience was not accepted by them voluntarily, but imposed on them from the outside, they expressed disagreement. Although the well-known procedure could become another boundary separating them from the “kuzmichi”.
Now their determination to follow the chosen line will mean a change in the audience in the stands. The most principled, emphatically professional fans will stay at home. And the composition of those who still come to the stadiums will initially be more even. Only those who agree with the new conditions for buying tickets will be there.
Will it hurt football attendance? This question cannot be answered without knowing how the clubs intend to dispose of the places in the stadium “bends”. How long are they willing to keep these sectors empty? After all, we are talking about those places that have a natural attraction for fans because of the lower cost. If the clubs are ready to sell tickets there, sooner or later there will be those who want to.
