Marked for Nikolay Pushkin
From our football correspondent
Steady
Squad12 Jul 2032
Danil Polyakh was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Squad12 Jul 2032
Maxim Abakumov has improved at 24, which nobody expected
Careers are supposed to plateau and then decline, and the players who ignore that are always the ones who were listening on the training ground. 3 points of it, over months, at an age where the direction normally only goes one way.
Boardroom12 Jul 2032
No signings allowed at Rubin Yalta
The manager may talk to whoever he likes and may pay nobody. A squad survives a window like this by borrowing, by promoting, and by hoping the injuries land somewhere else.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Steady
Squad5 Jul 2032
Savely Kurlov damages knee ligaments — 18 days out
The words a physio says slowly. 18 days is what the club will announce and everybody who has heard this diagnosis before knows the number is the least of it: the knee comes back before the player does.
Market5 Jul 2032
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Evgeny Berezhnoy will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Rubin Yalta the goodbyes have quietly begun.
Squad5 Jul 2032
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Rubin Yalta this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Boardroom5 Jul 2032
The owner puts $106.1K into Rubin Yalta
This is money that keeps the lights on rather than money that buys a centre-half, and the difference is the whole story. A club funded by its owner rather than by its football has exactly one conversation left ahead of it.
Squad5 Jul 2032
Vladyslav Shvorak 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.
Boardroom5 Jul 2032
The borrowing is past what the bank agreed, which is the line where a debt stops being how football is financed and starts being a problem. Every phone-in in this town will quote the figure for the next five years.
Squad5 Jul 2032
The manager makes an example of Ilja Glebov
“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.
Boardroom5 Jul 2032
89% of the income goes out in wages at Rubin Yalta
Every club in football pays most of what it earns to its players. Paying nearly all of it is a different arrangement, and it has ended the same way every time somebody has tried it.
Market5 Jul 2032
He is 18, and nobody at Rubin Yalta signed him for this season. Deals like this are judged in four years, by people who may not still be in the building.