Football Season Guide

CSKA Moscow had a season to forget last year as what was a very promising and exciting campaign in the autumn turned into a farce in the spring. The Fabio Celestini experiment seemed to be working well at first as he gave the talented players in the team a platform to play with freedom while the defence was holding well. But the decision to sell Igor Diveev to Zenit in February without really getting the replacement proved a fatal mistake as the team started 2026 with four straight losses, having lost just twice before that, and immediately their title charge turned into dust. The morale sapped after that and the squad started to fight back against Celestini and his ostracising of some players. He was eventually sacked in early May and youth coach Dmitri Igdisamov was appointed as a caretaker. There was an expectation that a new foreign manager will arrive in the summer but after failing to get a few of their main targets, including Sandro Schwarz, who preferred his old club Dinamo Moscow over them, they settled for Igdisamov as the new permanent coach. He is a bright and proactive coach who developed a lot of the current first-team players while at the academy and it is not necessarily a bad choice. But he does lack authority, name recognition and first-team management experience and will be certainly up against it in the coming months. Yet if he manages to unite the squad and get some good results early on, the positive momentum can certainly carry the Army Men far. Their transfer campaign remains very much on hold for now, with no one coming and rumours flying about possible departures of key players like Matvey Kislyak and Kirill Glebov. There is a strong starting 11 there if everyone is fit, possibly the third best in the league, but the main worry is the general lack of depth and the lack of leadership and solidity at the back. Kirill Danilov and Matvey Lukin are good players in the making but lack the physical profile to stand up to the best strikers in the league and that is something that could well cost CSKA this season. As a whole, the club is in a bit of a stasis now as they are not too ambitious with their plans and there cannot be too many big expectations towards the coach and the squad. They should probably make the top six but are likely at the bottom part of it.