Football Season Guide

Dinamo Moscow had another mostly underwhelming season last year in which they started with grand ambitions after appointing national team coach Valeri Karpin. The fit never really worked though as he played far too conservatively and the performances were just far too uninspired for too long. Once Rolan Gusev got appointed at the end of November, there was an uptick of performances and some really impressive attacking showings. However, they failed to sustain that form late in the season and at the end had to settle for a sixth-place finish. Now Gusev has been replaced by German Sandro Schwarz, who is back to the club where he made a lot of friends and gained plenty of acclaim during the period he was in charge, from October 2020 to June 2022. The team played with real intensity, pressed from the front, and were not afraid to have a go at the top dogs, even challenging for the title all the way until the end in his second season. That said, back then the likes of Sebastian Szymanski, Nikola Moro and Arsen Zakharyan were lighting up the team and now this calibre of players is just not at his disposal. Now Schwarz will have to work his magic with players like Arthur Gomes, Yaroslav Gladyshev and Bitello, who do have their qualities and can be quite useful at this level, but are hardly game-changers. The coach will certainly be hoping that a few more players join the squad in the coming weeks as for now the squad is pretty much the same from last year and there is just not enough genuine quality in the final third to cause problems to the likes of Krasnodar and Zenit. That said, Dinamo should still be one of the better teams in the league and can easily get a spot in the top three if they get some early momentum and there is a chemistry in the squad.