Young club at the top of a football pyramid
The new champion of Russia was Krasnodar, who kept the advantage in the final round of the championship in one point over the end of the last decade “Zenith”. The path to the gold of the club, founded only in 2008, is remarkable not only by the unprecedented by the standards of a high -level league by swiftness, but also to dissimilarity on the path to the trophies of other grads from the point of view of strategy. In it, priority always belonged not to short -term, but by fundamental investments.
The championship of Russia ended on Saturday gave a new champion. The seventh after Spartak, Alania, Lokomotiv, CSKA, Rubin and Zenit, a club that managed to win gold in it, became Krasnodar. In the final round, he defeated at home – 3: 0 – the Moscow Dynamo and saved the separation from the only competitor who beat Akhmat with the same competitor. The competitor was the winning the six previous championships “Zenit”, who had been walking in the nostril in the nostril with the Krasnodar for a long time, but nevertheless lost the club in the championship race, about which with a clear conscience, without fear of reproaches in hyperbolization of success, can be discussed as a full -fledged football phenomenon.
At hand, at least a purely formal base for this.
“Krasnodar” is not just very young, but literally a young club.
It was founded in 2008. And few paid attention to his birth. In that year, all sorts of high-profile football events related to Russia were enough: Zenit won the UEFA Cup, which later transformed into the European League, and the Russian team made an unprecedented take-off, breaking into the semi-finals of the Austrian-Schwal Championship of Europe. Against this background, the appearance of the next team somewhere in the half-amateur bowels of domestic football, even if the name of its owner-entrepreneur Sergey Galitsky-is well known in the country, could not make a particular impression.
Thus, the whole path of the “Krasnodar” from the “zero mark” to the top at the top of the inner hierarchy took 17 years. This is not just a rapid ascent, but an unprecedentedly rapid at least for the leading-English, Spanish, German, Italian and French-and those that are next to the leading, championships, such as the Russian championship, which in the UEFA coefficients to the “isolation sanctions” of 2022 was located in the top ten. In the current century, in the same “large five”, clubs sometimes perceived as upstarts, either for a long time, or, as the Krasnodar, who never mined trophies, sometimes got to gold. But all of them – the English “Leicester”, the German “Wolfsburg” and “Bayer”, the French “Montpellier” and “Lielle” – at the time of the triumph there was more than half a century, some – and the whole century. So in search of at least something similar to the precedent, one has to go deeper, finding, for example, that the Danish Copenhagen took gold in 1993 in the debut season, and immediately rubbing the clarification of the whole effect: the club was formed as a result of the merger of two strong teams from the capital of Denmark, and the debut, it turns out, strictly speaking, was not at all a debut.
But there is also a more important factor. These are the stylistic features of the Krasnodar ascent, distinguishing it among Russian and foreign grads.
The reasons for discussing their prospects are usually reduced to activities in the transfer market, to sonorous transactions as a pledge of future achievements. In this sense, “Krasnodar” is a story of a completely different kind.
It seems that the rating that ranks the teams in the championship not by points, but according to a criterion that often applied in unsportsmaning segments, where not so much absolute indicators as the price that they had reached, is not so important. In football, it is determined in different ways, but the most affordable and reliable of methods is the calculation of the value of club applications that Transfermarkt regularly conducts. In the classification of Kommersant, effectiveness is determined by their attitude to the number of points obtained in the championship.
So, such a table, compiled according to the results of the next Russian championship, has a rather curious look. At the top there are middle peasants and even clubs that fight for survival in the elite (see drawing). But this is actually a normal situation, in the “big five” it is approximately the same: special ambitions require special costs, hence – the high cost of points of the fighting for awards. Nevertheless, Krasnodar still appeals to the eyes. Its indicator is the smallest if you take the six of the indisputable Russian grads (along with it and Zenit, Moscow CSKA, Spartak, Dynamo and Lokomotiv are included in it). The Krasnodar people were even ahead of the recently extremely restrained and accurate in the selection of army men, as well as officially produced a course to rejection of tranquility for the development of players and strictly adhering to the railway workers.
And the whole point is that Krasnodar this season was modest if you measure its brilliance with a transfer rating, an application. She is cheaper than Zenitskaya by more than two times, Spartakovskaya – nearly one and a half. The football players are truly expensive in it-except that the bombarder John Cordoba da player, Eduard Spertsyan, according to the Transfermarkt version, standing € 14 million and € 20 million, respectively. The rest is far from 10 millionth. Moreover, the stalk, the Krasnodar pupil, the club actually did not have to acquire.
The Krasnodar has always been talked about in the context of investments of more fundamental ones: that arose simultaneously with the club of the Academy, attention to the youth, the construction of a beautiful club stadium with modern, according to all the canons of advanced urbanism, the space around it, the work to build a fan base.
And in these aspects of the achievement of “Krasnodar”, his management and his enthusiastic football of the first person were quite obvious earlier.
The Academy – most likely, the best in the country, is admired even by guests from Europe. The attendance of home matches, which went through for 27 thousand spectators, despite the FAN ID and fan boycotts, the second in Russia after Zenitskaya, is higher than that of Spartak, despite the fact that the fans at one time needed to fight with a noticeable football brand – Kuban.
Everything was fine, except for one. With the trophies of this systemic, “correct” “Krasnodar” did not work out: he was mistaken with the coach, then with preparation for decisive matches, then there was simply not enough power. He went to the final of the Russian Cup-and lost, not bad, segments-precisely in the CCHIP, looked in the championship and still limited to bronze or in places lower. A year ago, he pulled out the same Dynamo in the final round, silver. But he was close to gold, and it again sailed to Zenit. Now, Krasnodar, with a chained pursuit and coach Murad Musaev, proved that the systematic and “correctness”, flavored with patience and determination, from time to time are cooler than huge money and envy of purchases.
