Russian spring “Ferencváros” – Newspaper Kommersant No. 202 (7403) of 10/29/2022

Former coach of the Russian national team Stanislav Cherchesov added a rather curious achievement to his coaching record. Under his leadership, Ferencváros, the flagship of Hungarian football, for the first time in almost half a century, was able to reach the decisive – spring – part of European competition. Participation in the play-offs of the Europa League, he secured himself in the fifth, penultimate round of the group stage, drawing at home with Monaco.

In the fifth round of the group stage of the Europa League, a new round of the most apparently “Russian” confrontation took place in the current European Cup season, which was left without domestic clubs due to sanctions. In it, in Budapest, the local Ferencvaros, which is coached by Stanislav Cherchesov, and Monaco, for which the leading midfielder of the Russian national team Alexander Golovin plays, met. The match ended in a draw – 1:1, which for the Hungarian team was akin to a victory. Thanks to her, Ferencváros retained leadership in Group H and secured participation in the play-offs of the second European Cup in terms of status. Monaco, who are three points behind him, as well as Turkish Trabzonspor and Serbian Red Star, who are one point behind the French club, will fight for another ticket.

This event is a notable cutoff in a rather strange coaching biography of Stanislav Cherchesov. There were several Russian clubs in it at once. But with none of them – neither with Spartak, nor with Terek, which later changed its name to Akhmat, nor with Amkar, nor with Dynamo – did Cherchesov achieve high-profile success. But he achieved them, getting out of the perimeter of the Russian Premier League (RPL).

At home, Stanislav Cherchesov, of course, is remembered primarily thanks to the 2018 World Cup. The Russian team playing at home was not quoted very highly, but managed to make a grandiose breakthrough by its standards, getting into the quarterfinals of the championship after winning in the starting round of the play-off against the unconditional grand – the Spanish team.

And at the club level, Stanislav Cherchesov showed himself best of all as a coach abroad for some reason. He began his coaching career in Austria in the mid-2000s, and under the guidance of a young specialist at that time, Wacker-Tyrol, who had just returned to the elite, managed to jump straight into sixth place in the championship.

Stanislav Cherchesov was appointed to the Russian national team after a short but productive period of work in Poland. He took over the Warsaw Legia in 2015 and won the gold of the national championship and the Cup of the country with it, turning into an extremely popular figure among the club’s fans. Before the start of the next season, Cherchesov, however, left him, but the resignation was not based on sports reasons, but on the conflict between the coach and the club management, who did not want to strengthen the squad before qualifying for the Champions League.

Ferencvaros Stanislav Cherchesov, who was fired from the Russian national team after a failure at the European Championship in the summer of 2021, was entrusted in the middle of last season, before the New Year holidays. The struggling club had an excellent second half, winning both the league and the Hungarian Cup, before slipping into the Champions League qualification and entering the Europa League group stage to achieve what looked like a major achievement by its own standards.

Founded at the end of the century before last, Ferencvaros was once a resounding brand. His uniform was worn by many celebrities of the 1950s and 1960s – the period when Hungarian football was among the world’s trendsetters: for example, Sandor Kocsis, Laszlo Kubala, Florian Albert. For a long time, Ferencváros was also part of the European Cup elite, and in 1965 they beat Juventus in the final of the Fairs Cup, the predecessor of the UEFA Cup, which turned into the Europa League.

The club made its last take-off in European competition ten years later. In 1975, he reached the final match of the Cup Winners’ Cup, but was defeated by Dynamo Kyiv – 3: 0. Dynamo were the first representatives of the USSR to take the European club trophy, and after that defeat, Ferencvaros transformed into a modest middle peasant who did not dream of at least relatively bright achievements. For 47 years, he failed to penetrate not only into the finals of the European Cups – into their decisive, spring, part: every time the campaign was interrupted at the distant approaches to the “advanced” stages of the play-offs, and after the European Cup reform of the 1990s and the emergence of group stages – just to the play-offs. Ferencvaros interrupted the series only after he believed in a Russian specialist with an ambiguous reputation, who, commenting on reaching the Europa League cup stage, said that it was based on the fact that his team, which still does not claim the right to be considered ” elite” of continental football, “played as a unit”.

Alexey Dospekhov