The head coach of the St. Petersburg football club Zenit, Sergei Semak, said that at the moment there are not enough players with Russian passports in the team.
“We have a shortage of Russian players on our application list, so Russian players – be it a defender, an attacking player or a midfield player – will certainly not interfere with us. We have Vasiliev, let’s see how he will look, we also took Akhmetov in the center of the field. Russian players, of course, we need, but as for replacements, today we have enough internal resources to replace a player,” CQ quotes Semak.
It recently became known that defender Danil Krugovoi will leave the blue-white-blues, who will become a CSKA player as a free agent in the summer of 2024.
Earlier, the ex-president of the capital’s football club “Spartak”, businessman Andrei Chervichenko, shared his opinion that the management of the St. Petersburg team has “entertainment” in the form of signing Russian players so that they receive little playing time at the club and spoil their careers.
The only Russian who joined the blue-white-blue squad in this transfer window was midfielder Ilzat Akhmetov, who transferred from Krasnodar. In a conversation with Match TV, Zenit Deputy General Director for Sports Development Andrei Arshavin noted that Akhmetov’s arrival in the team can be described as “from bench to bench.”
Meanwhile, the St. Petersburg football club continues to be rocked by scandals – in particular, the head of the board of Zenit, Alexander Medvedev, provoked an ambiguous situation (Read more about this here), which is usually followed by a call to a meeting of the RFU Ethics Committee.
Source: Rosbalt
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