The head coach of Spartak Moscow, Guillermo Abascal, was dismissed

Spaniard Guillermo Abascal completed a classic short journey for a coach who had the opportunity to lead Spartak Moscow in this century. Perceived at the beginning, despite his modest and even strange background, almost as a fantastically successful find for the club for the years to come, he quickly acquired the status of a loser, whose decisions and results are usually mocked. It was cemented by the disastrous restart of this season. Mr. Abascal was fired after the defeat to the outsider Sochi – the third for Spartak in five rounds after the resumption of the Russian championship.

Moscow “Spartak” announced about the dismissal of head coach Guillermo Abascal, wishing the Spaniard “good luck in his future career” in an extremely laconic message dedicated to him. The club added that Mr. Abaskal’s assistant, Vladimir Sliskovich, will prepare him for the next match. The match will be very noticeable. In the return semi-final game of the “RPL Path” of the Russian Cup, “Spartak” meets on the road with the flagship of domestic football “Zenith”, to which they lost in the home game with a minimal score of 1:2.

The news of Guillermo Abascal’s resignation was received quite calmly in the Russian football community for obvious reasons.

It has been positioned as something absolutely inevitable for several weeks and, in fact, only confirmed the assumption that the Spaniard has finally exhausted his credibility and Spartak is ready to put an end to a story that looks quite dramatic, but in fact is for him absolutely archetypal.

Guillermo Abascal appeared at the Moscow club in June 2022, having received the post vacated by the Italian Paolo Vanoli, who had just won the Russian Cup but decided to return to his homeland, and turned out to be the last coach whose appointment was sanctioned by Leonid Fedun. He was considered the main owner of Spartak since 2003, and a little over two months after Mr. Abascal appeared in it, the team came under the control of LUKOIL, the “native” company for Mr. Fedun, who held the position of vice president in it before the start of the special military operation in Ukraine .

One of the striking features of Spartak during its ownership of the capital’s giants was the coaching leapfrog.

Over these nearly two decades, more than one and a half dozen specialists managed to supervise it, not counting those who only had the status of “acting.” At the same time, none of them, even Massimo Carrera, who took the only Spartak gold medal in the “Fedun era” in 2017, managed to hold out in office for at least two full seasons (the exception was once the current coach of the Russian national team Valery Karpin, who, however, was also club top manager).

Among these mentors there were people with different track records. But the lion’s share of them, no matter what the track record or the sonority of the name, followed the same path in Spartak in terms of style, semantic content, or something, changing images in a fairly clear order – from a person who, despite recent doubts, are looked at as a surprisingly successful choice with great prospects, to an absolute loser, it is unclear how he penetrated into the club, dreaming of returning to its former solid leadership positions.

Guillermo Abascal did not escape any of these stages. The image of an extremely risky option for Spartak was ensured by his exceptional youth (at the time of his appointment he was 33 years old), as well as a lack of experience as a head coach, which was exhausted by four months in the Swiss Basel. The image of unexpected hope for the long term is a great start to Spartak’s career. In the previous championship, Spartak was in the lead, scored a lot and even began to seem like a real competitor to Zenit, which it managed to defeat in the cup match with a score of 3:0. The impressions were slightly spoiled by the end of that season with elimination from the National Cup by Akron from the second-ranking division and a mediocre spring part of the championship. But the bronze mined there was still worth achieving for the young Spaniard.

Meanwhile, this stage smoothly flowed into the next, completely crossing it out. Having spent €37 million in two transfer windows directly related to the current season – the summer of 2023 and the winter of 2024 – to strengthen the squad (only Zenit invested more in newcomers in the Russian Premier League), Spartak failed in terms of plans back in the fall stability and brightness. And in the spring, having lost leading forward Quincy Promes, who was convicted in his native Netherlands on two criminal charges for a total of seven and a half years and arrested UAE law enforcement authorities at the end of the club’s training camp, he found himself in a real crisis.

Guillermo Abascal’s dismissal took place a day after the championship match, in which Spartak lost – 0:1 – to Sochi, which was at the bottom of the table and surpassed the Muscovites in all the most important statistical indicators.

The defeat fit into a sad trend. Before that, in three out of four spring rounds, the opponents – Zenit, Fakel and Ural – did not allow Spartak to hit their goal at least once (he managed to earn a point only in the match with the St. Petersburg team). The match with Dynamo fell out of trend. But Spartak beat it – 2:1 – scoring both goals after very serious mistakes by goalkeeper Igor Leshchuk.

Analysis of recent failures almost invariably came down to the actions of Guillermo Abascal, who was in conflict with captain Georgiy Dzhikia, leaving the newly effective Ruslan Litvinov in reserve, placing Jesus Medina and Victor Moses in unusual positions, running into stupid disqualificationand justifies his breakdowns with strange phrases like admitting that the starting line-up is “prompted by God.”

In April, the transformation of the Spaniard in the perception of the football world from a potential hero into a “clown” took final shape – as, apparently, in the perception of Spartak management, which now, it seems, will have to intrigue the club’s fans with the search for a successor for Guillermo Abascal.

Bosnian Vladimir Sliskovic, whose professional resume contains no record of his great value to a team with ambitions, is not like him. And regarding the more thorough options, the range of opinions in Russian sources is enormous. Most often, in the context of the interest of the current owners of Spartak, which, despite the failures, is actually only three points from the top three in the championship, they mentioned Valery Karpin, former coach of the Russian national team Stanislav Cherchesov and the Dutchman Pascal Jansen.

Alexey Dospehov