Which hole does Micah Wedge patch?

He generally went in a new way, this transfer period. Unusual. And "sour" at first glance. Where are payroll-sized listings? Where are the big names? Rixen? Tekke? Barrientos? Well, yes - especially against the background of the Yaroslavl acquisition by the name of Mikhail Klin.

Generalizations are dangerous here. It is impossible to generalize “Amkar”, for example, and CSKA on the grounds that both have not acquired anyone (the army, however, returned the defender Oleg Malyukov from the Nizhny Novgorod lease). And yet there are two reasons that somehow affect the transfer policy of all the teams of the Premier League. The limit on foreign players, which today allows 8 foreigners to enter the field, will become tougher with each new season. Deficit of Russian football players. Hence such passivity.

Hence the current summer acquisitions - usually patching holes. If there is a problem position, a person is taken to it. Usually a legionnaire. And just for the sake of gain, no one is now wasted. Or rather, how: buying a player for a problem position is also an enhancement, and in the case of, for example, Geder, who transferred to Spartak, the reinforcement is very high-quality. But it was still done on the principle “so as not to get worse” - Spartak has difficulties with the defense line, they are trying to eliminate them first of all, this is natural and necessary. But in the second place, after all, it was possible to strengthen other positions, just in order to become stronger. And “Spartak”, by the way, planned to acquire a striker in the summer, despite the fact that today it is the most productive team in Russia. But not acquired. What has stopped? Hardly the price. It’s just that Russians, apparently, not suitable for Spartak, are not for sale, and there is no incentive to buy a good legionnaire if there is no gap in the line-up.

Foreigners were taken only for special needs. As a result, it was not their quantity that suffered, but the quality. Top-level clubs prefer not to get involved with serious legionaries, and those who urgently need to strengthen themselves still attract outside labor - there is no choice. Moreover, these acquisitions are treated as momentary. In any case, players from Zimbabwe and North Korea were not invited to our championship even in the mid-90s.

This can result in stagnation. The Russian Premier League is not the worst football tournament, many do not have one, but it is too early for her to stop developing. There is an English, over the years proven way to limit the influx of foreign players into the country without compromising the quality of football. This is when the limit does not apply to good foreign players. As a good-bad criterion, you can take the number of matches for a team played in a certain period of time, the place of this team in the FIFA ranking - in a word, come up with a formula that most accurately and soberly reflects the needs of this championship. That is, we do not have to wait for players of the Jo or Carvalho level to play 10 matches for the Brazilian national team; in the case of this country, one game for the youth team will come down quite well. And for the players from the Slovenian Domjale, the Zimbabwean MPPJ and the trade union team of the North Korean railway workers, higher barriers can be put.

The most interesting thing is that in Russia there was already a semblance of a qualitative rather than a quantitative limit: last year, the legionnaires who played 10 matches for the national team were given so-called green cards, and then they were no longer considered legionnaires. There were flaws: in particular, no difference was made between the national teams of Argentina and, say, Moldova. But, instead of eliminating this shortcoming, the Premier League, with the filing of the RFU, went along the path of even more leveling, removing the difference between the player being called to the national team and not being called.

5 high-profile acquisitions of this summer

* In millions of euros. Unofficial data

Chermen DZGOEV