The Caucasus Question in Russian Football

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Sometimes football rivalry can go further than just fans’s distaste for other clubs and their traditions. False Nine Russian correspondent, Andy Shenk, looks at the Caucasus region in Russia and how the area’s recent success in football has exacerbated further tensions between ethnic Russians and their mountainous compatriots…

For many in the United States, Russia brings to mind only cold Siberian steppes and grey old women in frumpy grey overcoats. The stereotype is as propaganda-driven as Russia’s perception of America as one big dissolute reality TV show. Continue reading

Match-Fixing and the Balance of Power in Russian Football

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As part of a series of articles on Russian football during the Winter break, False Nine Russian correspondent and debutant contributor, Andy Shenk, pores over the latest scandal in a saga of incidents that have brought match-fixing to the forefront of the squabbling authorities’s attention…

Russian football rumbles often with news of match-fixing, from the lowest to the highest levels. In 2009, Kryliya Sovetov lost 3-2 to Terek in Grozny in a Premier League encounter that reeked of corruption. Though neither team suffered any consequences, Leonid Slutsky, Kryliya manager at the time, commented several years later on the suspiciousness of the match: “I understood that the substance of that history was known at all levels – from Mutko [head of the Russian Football Union then] to the journalists. It’s just that no one’s yet to write the truth of the match in Grozny.” Continue reading