Football Season Guide

Spartak Moscow had a pretty good and satisfying campaign in which they were quite solid and hard to beat for the majority of the season, and even capped their campaign with a penalty shootout win over Krasnodar in the Cup final, their first piece of silverware since 2022 and just their third since 2002. Juan Carlos Carcedo was a pretty positive and interesting appointment back in January and has largely met expectations so far. He was always on the front foot with his selections, albeit making some strange selection choices in terms of positions, and the fans will be now starting to get up for a proper title challenge from their favourites. Truth be told, though, this Spartak squad lacks two or three real game-changers who can genuinely turn a game around when things are not looking that good. A new big signing in attack is expected soon as Manfred Ugalde seems to be on the way out but whether he can bring in the goals remains up in the air. Gedson and Nail Umuyarov are a very solid pair in midfield, with Ezequel Barco ahead of them, but the wingers remain far too inconsistent and unreliable. The defence seems to be in good stead with Srdjan Babic back from injury and some other solid alternatives, but once again, the team is lacking genuine threat in wide areas. The sole new signing so far, Victor Parada from Alaves, is a decent player who can do a job at left-back but he is unlikely to lift the level of the squad by himself. Vladimir Saus will hope to kick on after his January move from Baltika has not worked out so far, with the other alternatives being players who are not good enough or are not really fullbacks. All in all, there is enough ground for justified optimism around Spartak but a talk of a title challenge seems a bit too fanciful at the moment as they just lack the star power of Zenit and Krasnodar up front.