Anzhi Makhachkala

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15491600

Really interesting read

 

Hate the bastards on fifa

 

Great read

I like that the players seem to genuinely want to improve the mood in Dagestan, but then again, if you're earning that much you'll pretty much agree to say anything!

The biggest hurdle they'll face is actually playing as a team. Their results so far (since E'too, Dzudzsak, Zhirkov etc came in) have been pretty mediocre and they seem to focus only on signing attacking players, especially LMs (Boussoufa, Zhirkov, Dzsudzak) which sort of limits them.

They'll probably end up like Man City but it's a case of whether the players will want to stick around for the time it takes to get there.

 

Spartak Moscow is my second team, and I have one problem about how Anzhi/Anji are going about, and that's they seem to be buying a lot of foreign players and in Russian league games you MUST have 5 Russians on the pitch at any time. Players can get naturalised but that takes 5 years and I think under Russian law it has to be done all in one lump, like you can't go live somewhere else. I think if you also played for another country regularly you count as foreign.

But yeah this Russian season still has a long way to go, the current season will be 1 and a half years long as they try and change their seasonal playing times to match the rest of europe.

 

Didn't know about the 5 Russians rule! I guess that's partly why they bought Zhirkov then? He's their only 'good' Russian player from what i know of them.

Also, surely if they play at the same times as other European leagues then they'll still need a massive winter break?

 

I think their current season started Feb 2011 and will end May 2012. After 30 games (16 teams in league), the top 8 play each other twice and the bottom 8 do the same. Think for their next season they stop playing at start of Dec and will start again in March. So yeah a long winter break .

There's also a rule that you need to have a russian who is under 21 years of age or so in the first 11 or on the bench.