If we are to see them back at the highest level anytime soon, they need to find an able replacement for Alexander Golovin , who was sold for big money to AS Monaco after an impressive World Cup for Russia.
Having endured a torrid period between the late s and first half of the s, Loko have bounced back by winning two Russian Cups and more importantly a Russian Premier League title in Much of their upturn over the last few years can be attributed to the guidance of legendary manager Yuri Semin , who returned to the reigns in The 72 year-old is now in his 4th spell in charge of the club, incredibly dating all the way back to when he first took charge of the club.
Consistency has been the most impressive attribute throughout the return to glory of the Moscow club. After winning the title in , they went on to finish second in and once again qualified for the UEFA Champions League. This season, they have been impressive throughout and are currently in 3rd place at the halfway stage of the season, just 3 points behind leaders Zenit.
Their Champions League campaign has also seen some useful performances, winning at Bayer Leverkusen and being narrowly beaten in Turin by Juventus despite leading for long periods. Interesting fact: Lokomotiv Moscow is still owned by the Russian Railways. In addition, they were the only club in Russia to have exclusively played top flight football until , when they were relegated to the second tier after finishing 15th in the league table.
However, they were immediately promoted back to the Russian Premier League and have spent the past two seasons at the highest level. Despite this, all is not well for Dinamo. After narrowly avoiding the relegation playoffs by finishing 12th last season, they are currently in deep relegation trouble again, languishing in 13th place after only three wins in the first half of the campaign.
Despite not performing well on the pitch, the club still have been attracting respectable average crowds of almost 14, Nikolai is the one furthest to the left. But it would be Nikolai Starostin and Spartak Moscow that would have the last laugh of all the teams, as Spartak re-built and resumed competition with Dynamo.
Starostin returned as president of Spartak in , a position he maintained until After decades of closely-fought competition with Dynamo, where they shared twenty-three Soviet league titles with Spartak, Dynamo would fade in importance in the late 20th Century, and the Spartak-Dynamo rivalry would lose its significance in the footballing calendar.
Dynamo have not won a league title since , and they have never won the Russian Premier League, the new league that was formed in in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. Spartak have won the new league nine times, and last season to the delight of Spartak fans, Dynamo were relegated from the top tier for the first time in their history.
Spartak, on the other hand, have gone from strength to strength — it seems that, in this instance, the little guy won. However, this was just the beginning of the footballing battle for Moscow.
Enter Lokomotiv Moscow. As the name suggests, the club has a strong relation to transport, as during the communist rule the Lokomotiv Voluntary Sports Society was owned by the Soviet Ministry of Transportation through the Russian Railways. After a relatively quiet start to their footballing existence, Lokomotiv came to prominence in when they gained promotion to the Soviet Top League, in the midst of the rivalry and dominance of Spartak and Dynamo.
But Lokomotiv very much maintained its own identity in Moscow; while other Soviet clubs very rarely played foreign teams amidst the tense political backdrop of the s, Lokomotiv often played friendly matches against teams in Europe, Africa, Asia and even North America. Moscow legend Yuri Semen at the Lokomotiv Stadium. This all changed towards the end of the 20th Century when they evolved from the weakest link to the best football team in Russia in just over a decade. He is currently enjoying his fourth tenure in charge of Lokomotiv, having first joined the club as a player in A number of smart signings and business decisions in the s led to a growth in support for this forgotten Russian club.
There is a fifth team in this merry-go-round of success and failure that has barely been mentioned so far, who have risen up to become the new challenger to Spartak Moscow, forming the main rivalry in the modern footballing calendar of Russia. However, it is in the modern era that they have truly emerged as a force to be reckoned with, winning six Russian Premier League titles in the last thirteen years, their most recent title coming last season. These groups, much like the ones seen at Euro , have been the source of a number of violent clashes that have led to as many as 1, security guards being deployed at derby matches.
The two sides have accounted for 15 of the 24 Russian Premier league titles since it began in , with their most recent encounter finishing to Spartak.
The game had to be halted for five minutes in the second half, when flares were thrown by CSKA supporters into a Spartak section of the crowd. With Spartak currently leading the league table and title holders CSKA close behind in third position, the tension only looks set to build as the season progresses, with the sides set to meet again in April. Meanwhile, Torpedo have split into multiple clubs and reside in the lower divisions, along with the once-mighty and now-fallen Dynamo.
Petersburg and also hosts less well-attended games, whilst Luzhniki Stadium once again became the biggest and best ground in the country when it re-opened in Russia played its first international match as a separated entity from the Soviet Union against Moscow in They won and a host of former USSR players were in the team. Guus Hiddink was the manager and they were drawn into a group containing Sweden, Spain and Greece. They finished second, making it through to the quarter-finals against the Netherlands.
They qualified for the semi-finals with a win after extra time and lost to eventual winners Spain. That is the only time that Russia have made it out of the group stage of an international tournament apart from reacing the quarter finals of the World Cup which they hosted in As is the case with every major European country, football was introduced to Russia by the British.
Scottish and English men working in St. Petersburg formed football teams at the end of the nineteenth century. Slowly but surely the sport spread throughout the rest of the country, gaining in popularity with local people who were intrigued by the game.
In the St. Petersburg Football League was formed, becoming the first football league in the country. During the s and s an extraordinarily gifted crop of players emerged in Russia.
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