No. 1, 2008

Support from LUKOIL has helped Spartak, Russia's most popular football team, to score remarkable successes

LUKOIL has supported Moscow’s football team Spartak for seven years, and for the last three years this team has won the silver medals of the national football championship. In the coming season Spartak aims to score major victories both in the Russian championship and in the European club tournaments.

The team’s hard-won victories

Moscow’s Spartak, often called “the red-and-white” because of the colors of the team’s uniform, enjoys especial popularity in Russia today – as it used to in many of the countries which made up the USSR. Not surprisingly, Spartak has even been dubbed “an all people’s football team.” This team was formed in 1935, somewhat later than the other two very popular Russian teams – Dynamo and CDKA (now called the Central Army Sports Club). The above circumstance may account for the fact that (as Nikolay Starostin, a noted Russian football player and founding father of the Spartak sports club, once put it) “people’s liking for the team is akin to a married couple’s love for their youngest child…”

Nikolay Starostin also said something that holds true to this day. “At once,” he noted, “football fans became fond of the players’ fine techniques and the team’s combinational style of attack executed by players who used their brains a lot – not only their feet.” According to the half-back Maxim Kalinichenko, one of Spartak’s leading players, who is also a member of the Ukrainian national team, “it’s true that we are fond of playing elegant football…”

As far as its achievements are concerned, Spartak is Russia’s best football team in the entire history of the country: it has been the USSR

champion twelve times and ten times it has won the USSR Cup; nine times it has been the champion of the Russian Federation, and three times it has captured the Cup of Russia. Spartak is the only Russian team to have reached the semifinals of all the European cup tournaments – the UEFA Cup, the Cup Winners Cup and the Champions Cup.

After the disintegration of the USSR Spartak was Russia’s foremost football team for many years, while the Spartak sports club trained top-notch players for many other teams, both in Russia and abroad. In the European arena Spartak enjoyed tremendous prestige and was feared by many of the

foremost teams, having defeated such celebrities as Real (Madrid), Ajax (Amsterdam), Liverpool, etc. However, Spartak failed to achieve the consistency of a truly topmost European football club. At times it had difficulty in retaining its best players: having attained maximum possible advantages in Russia, they strove to leave abroad where the terms of the contracts offered to them were much better. Moreover, the budget of Russia’s leading sports club was far inferior to the budgets of Europe’s “top twenty.” To compete with the European elite on equal terms Spartak needed solid financial support and new managerial policies.

The year 2000, when LUKOIL became Spartak’s general sponsor, marked a new chapter in the history of the club. Owing to the company’s material support, Spartak could attract strong players from other countries and make plans for the construction of its own state-of-the-art stadium. However, by then the Spartak football team had entered a period of decline owing to the retirement in 2003 of its long-time coach, Oleg Romantsev. And it was difficult to overcome that period all at once. In fact, the team had to be completely rebuilt. And then in 2005 and 2006 Spartak became the country’s silver-winner. The fans began talking of the great club’s rebirth…

Following its guiding star

The 2007 championship tournament was marked by a desperate struggle, with the title being contested until the very last round. Again Spartak won the silver, but the team had shown itself to be quite worthy of the gold.

As Roman Pavlyuchenko, the best striker of that tournament, has aptly put it, “our silver medals had a golden tint to them.” Indeed, during the tournament Spartak had twice defeated St. Petersburg’s Zenit, the gold medalist of the 2007 championship. It was largely because of the series of injuries sustained by Spartak’s leading players and the resulting inconsistent play by the team during the first half of the tournament that the “red-and-white” were stopped just one step away from winning the gold.

Speaking at the award presentation ceremony, Leonid Fedun, LUKOIL’s Vice-President, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Spartak and its chief stockholder, said: “This silver has been won at the cost of much blood and sweat and owing to excellent teamwork on the part of the players, despite their injuries.” He wished the team to win the gold in the coming season.

The present team has an excellent potential for that. Its goal is tended by Stipe Pletikosa, a member of Croatia’s national team and one of the best goalkeepers in Europe. Its forward line is spearheaded by that born striker, Roman Pavlyuchenko, as well as by Soares Welliton, a talented young Brazilian – a new acquisition of the “red-and-white,” and Alexander Prudnikov, a former member of the team that won the European Championship for 17-year-olds in 2006. In the half-back line the team boasts Yegor Titov, an old-timer who is a real symbol of Spartak. In the opinion of specialists, he is the country’s best play-maker. On the right wing, the team has its fast-footed Vladimir Bystrov. Its defense is pivoted on Santos Mozart, a highly reliable Brazilian half-back. A Czech player Radoslav Kovac would be a good asset to any of the best European teams. A rising star of the defense line is Martin Stranzl, who is also one of the best players on Austria’s national team. Three young defenders worthy of note are: Fyodor Kudryashov, Andrey Ivanov and Roman Shishkin, who at the end of the championship tournament demonstrated a huge potential for professional growth.

For the past two seasons Spartak’s young players confidently won the gold as members of the second-string team, and they were often given the chance to play on the first string. Undoubtedly, the coming season will help single out many promising players. Besides, by the new season the team will be strengthened with the newly-acquired players: defender Egor Filipenko from Belorus, Argentina under-21 international midfielder Christian Maidana, Igor Gorbatenko, a winner of the 2006 UEFA European Under-17 Championship, and others.

Led by Stanislav Cherchesov, Spartak’s former goalkeeper who became the team’s head coach in the middle of the season, the “red-and-white” fought its way into UEFA Cup Round of 32, the second most important European club competition. To achieve that Spartak had to defeat, in a group tournament and playing on the home field, the German team Bayer 04 Leverkuzen and the Swiss team Zurich, as well as to draw against Czechia’s Sparta. Furthermore, it was precisely Spartak’s victories that enabled Russia to chalk up the UEFA rating points needed for entering two of the country’s best teams in the Champions League tournament in 2008.

Another highlight of the year 2007 was the laying of the cornerstone of Spartak’s future stadium. Paradoxically, in the course of its entire history the country’s strongest team has had to play matches, which it officially “hosted,” at stadiums belonging to other Moscow clubs. Spartak’s own stadium is to be built in Tushino, Moscow’s northern district, and is planned to be completed by the year 2010. According to Leonid Fedun, its construction will cost the club close to $500 million. The stadium will be a unique place for Russia – combining a supermodern football arena with indoor sports and recreational facilities.

Its football field, 110 by 72 m, will have a natural lawn and accord with all of the UEFA standards. The stands will have seats for more than 42,000 spectators, while the main sports and recreational hall capable to accommodate 12,000 visitors is intended for holding football training sessions and tennis, handball, volleyball and basketball competitions, as well as concerts and other performances.

In the football season of 2008 Spartak will be one of the main contenders for the gold medal of the national championship. If its hopes and aspirations are realized, the team will gain the privilege of placing a second gold star above its emblem (according to the rules of the Russian Premier League, a football team which has won the national title five times is awarded the right to have a gold star depicted on top of its emblem). Indeed, it is high time for Spartak to become the national champion once again…