Marked for Aidan Ibrahimaga
From our football correspondent
Triumph
Squad28 Sep 2026
A knee injury of the worst kind for Evgeny Osipov
148 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Kuban lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Match28 Sep 2026
Kuban up to position 1
25 points on the board and a place in the leading group. Nobody at the ground is saying the word out loud yet.
Match26 Sep 2026
5‑0, and the margin flattered nobody — it could have carried another goal or two without complaint. Afternoons like this are why people keep coming.
Player ratings28 Sep 2026
A brace, and Dmitry Kotov takes the afternoon — 8.41
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Dmitry Kotov provided it, and the 8.41 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
Match26 Sep 2026
Kuban cannot stop winning
4 wins on the spin now, and the question has changed from whether the run ends to who ends it. Confidence like this cannot be bought; it has to be earned exactly this way.
Squad28 Sep 2026
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Kuban this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad28 Sep 2026
Words at Kuban training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Sergey Terekhov is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Player ratings28 Sep 2026
Ninety minutes of Ilja Moseichuk at his very best
Marked 8.57. Players have careers without a single afternoon like this in them, and he has just had one in front of everybody at Kuban.
Player ratings28 Sep 2026
Mikhail Ageev was on a different afternoon to everybody else
8.05. There are performances a supporter describes to somebody who was not there and cannot quite convey; this was one, and the number does not help either.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Upbeat
Player ratings31 Aug 2026
Successful dribbles: 35. Every time he got the ball somebody had to make a decision, and every time the decision was wrong.
Match31 Aug 2026
Kuban are in among the leaders
Position 1 and 13 points on the board. Nobody at the ground will say the word out loud yet, and everybody at the ground is thinking it.
Market31 Aug 2026
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Kuban can pretend not to have heard.
Squad31 Aug 2026
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Kuban this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Match29 Aug 2026
Whatever happens, Kuban do not lose
6 games unbeaten now. Some were earned and some were survived, but a habit is forming — and habits are the hardest thing in football to play against.
Squad31 Aug 2026
Igor Bezdenezhnykh falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Squad31 Aug 2026
The manager makes an example of Ilja Molteninov
“If you cannot run for the shirt, somebody else will wear it.” No name was used and none was needed; every player in that room knew who it was for.
Player ratings31 Aug 2026
Some games turn on a moment; this one turned on a man. 7.72 on the card, and the Kuban support went home talking about one name.
Market31 Aug 2026
He is 20, and the scouting reports agree on the only line that matters: the ceiling. Signings like this are lottery tickets written by professionals.
From our football correspondent
Uneasy
Squad3 Aug 2026
369 appearances across 9 seasons in these colours. Careers like that are not built any more, and Helsingborg know what they have.
Player ratings3 Aug 2026
Successful dribbles: 24. There is a particular sort of despair on a full-back's face by the seventieth minute, and it was on display.
Squad3 Aug 2026
“Some decisions take a long time. This one took ten minutes, and most of that was finding a pen.” Johan Brattberg and Helsingborg agree another 4 years.
Squad3 Aug 2026
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Helsingborg this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad3 Aug 2026
Words at Helsingborg training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Jakob Voelkerling Persson is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Market3 Aug 2026
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Helsingborg, another week without a signature from Max Svensson.
Market3 Aug 2026
49 months to run and not a word offered. A club that lets the calendar negotiate for it usually ends up losing to the calendar.
Match1 Aug 2026
The crowd waited for a goal that never came. Falkenberg defended in numbers and left with what they came for, and the two sides could be playing still without troubling a scorer.
Market3 Aug 2026
5 months remain and no agreement is close. Every week without a signature costs Helsingborg money.