Soviet League could return

Last update 1 December, 2012 por Alberto Llopis

The Russian Soccer Honor Division considers recovering the Soviet league, initiative that has already received the support of several federations in the region, like the ukrainian, the Belarusian and the Armenian.

“Several large Russian clubs have asked me to study and prepare a proposal to create a CIS football championship” (post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States), said Sergei Priadkin, league president.

Priadkin called the proposal, whose initiator was Alexei Miller, president of the gas consortium Gazprom, sponsor of Zenit, de “accurate and interesting” and assured that the league assumes the responsibility of launching this initiative, according to a statement published on its website.

the soviet league, which included teams from several European and Caucasian republics and was one of the strongest championships on the continent, disappeared in 1991 coinciding with the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The head of the Kremlin administration, Sergei Ivanov, today supported the initiative, although he acknowledged that it will not be feasible in the short term. “Such a championship, where the best clubs from three-five CIS countries would participate, It should necessarily be stronger and more spectacular than any other league separately from a sporting point of view.. The same thing has already happened with basketball and hockey.”, pointed out.

Ivanov highlighted that UEFA seems to have changed its contrary stance regarding the emergence of regional leagues, as is the case of the one prepared by the three Baltic republics: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The Russian official, well-known CSKA fan, assured that the main Ukrainian teams -Shakhtar, FC dynamo Kyiv, Metallist y Dnieper- are interested in competing in a regional soccer league. Anzhí Makhachkala, russian, el Dinamo Kiev, Ukrainian, the club that won the most titles in the defunct Soviet league, and the BATÉ, Belarusians have already openly supported the idea.

En cambio, former prime minister and former president of Dinamo Moscow, Sergei Stepashin, questioned the advent of a regional league, since he believes that UEFA will never give its approval.

Unlike its predecessor, The Russian league has fallen behind over the years and currently its level of quality and results is far from championships like the Spanish one., English or Italian. The clubs themselves argue that the large difference in budget and squad between teams like Zenit and CSKA Moscow, and the rest of the teams take away the shine and intrigue from the matches, which also influences the drastic drop in the number of fans who come to the stadium. Russia will organize for the first time in 2018 la Copa Mundial de fútbol.