In the match between CSKA and Zenit there will be many additional intrigues, apart from the main one related to the result. It is interesting, for example, how Alexander Sobolev makes his debut for the Russian champion. No less interesting is how Danil Krugovoy, a graduate of the blue and white, will play against his former team. His departure from the St. Petersburg club to the Moscow one came with a hint of scandal. Moreover, Krugovoy’s transfer is unique in its own way, because players have not moved from Zenit to CSKA or back for more than 20 years! And there is a reason for that. Let’s remember history.
It is hard to believe, but the last transfer between CSKA and Zenit before last summer took place in 2002. During that winter window before the start of the 2002 season, the first foreign players in its history appeared at the St. Petersburg club: Serbians Milan Vještica, Vladimir Mudrinic and Predrag Randjelovic. If the first two were found in the Serbian championship, then the striker was taken away from CSKA.
Zenit’s then sporting director Boris Rapoport recounted how Randjelovic and his two compatriots were signed:
“The third foreigner we raised to the flag is Predrag Randjelovic. Gazzaev left him for CSKA. We watched several tapes of his performances at Anzhi and at the military club. He played brilliantly and scored a lot. Even the guys said that Randjelovic simply worked miracles during our team’s training sessions…
If memory serves me right, the cost of Vještica’s transfer was about $800,000, Mudrinic was cheaper – $500-600,000, Randjelovic cost a million dollars. Given Giner’s good relationship with Mutko, the military team waited a long time while we searched for means.”
Predrag Randjelovic
Photo: pfc-cska.com/fc-zenit.ru
Randjelovic played for CSKA just six months after moving from Anzhi. He really showed high performance: he scored nine goals in 15 matches for the army team. However, Valery Gazzaev did not like him. Zenit, which won bronze in the 2001 season and secured a ticket to European competition, was looking for reinforcements in attack. But it turned out that I missed the transfer. The striker, nicknamed Pager, also disappointed the coach of the blue and white team, Yuri Morozov. Randjelovic lacked efficiency on the field, stopped scoring goals: in 17 matches for Zenit he scored only four goals, three of them against Encamp from Andorra in the UEFA Cup.
After that, Zenit and CSKA forgot each other on the transfer market. And in the late 2000s, two clubs fighting for the championship title signed a “non-aggression pact”. Zenit president Alexander Dyukov agreed with his CSKA colleague Evgeny Giner not to alienate players.
“Zenit approached us to buy players,” Giner explained in 2010. “But we discussed this situation with the Zenit management and reached a compromise. There are vampire clubs and donor clubs. The first group includes CSKA and Zenit. We have a gentlemen’s agreement. The decision on the transfer of our players is made solely at the level of Giner-Dyukov.”
Evgeniy Giner / Alexander Dyukov
Photo: Alexander Safonov, “Championship”/RIA Novosti
This agreement was in place for many years. In 2016, Dyukov, answering a question about whether Zenit wanted to hire CSKA coach Leonid Slutsky to replace the outgoing André Villas-Boas, admitted:
“We need a qualified specialist who can perform the tasks entrusted to him. It doesn’t matter what kind of passport he has. All things being equal, priority will be given to the Russian specialist. Slutsky to Zenit? This is impossible because we have an agreement with CSKA. Of course, I can call Evgeny Giner and ask him to give the green light to Slutsky’s transfer to Zenit. But I don’t think Evgeniy will let him go.”
Now the gentleman’s agreement has lost its relevance. In the summer of 2023, Zenit signed Mario Fernandez. Although the Brazilian did not move directly from CSKA, but from Brazilian Internacional, the defender had an agreement with the army team to return to the Moscow club. True, Zenit claimed that they only entered into negotiations with Fernandez when it became clear that CSKA would not pay the 365 thousand euros required for Mario. The army leadership apparently thinks otherwise.
Krugovoy’s transfer also took place without direct interaction between the clubs. CSKA simply took advantage of the fact that Danil became a free agent in the summer of 2024, and six months before the end of the defender’s contract with Zenit, agreed on an off-season transfer. The St. Petersburg club was negotiating with Krugov on the extension of the contract, and in the end, unexpectedly for everyone in the management, it became known that the student would leave for free.
Zenit seemed to be going back 30 years, when it was going through difficult times and its best players were signed by CSKA. For example, in the early 1990s there were transfers of defenders Vasily Ivanov and Denis Mashkarin. But the loudest were the last transfers of players from the St. Petersburg club to the Moscow club before the Rotunda.
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At the end of the 1996 season, the first for the blue-and-whites after returning to the top league, a conflict broke out between Zenit president Vitaly Mutko and coach Pavel Sadyrin. The result was Sadyrin’s departure from the team. Then the whole of St. Petersburg football was in shock, because Mutko removed the legend and fan favorite from the team.
Soon Sadyrin took charge of CSKA, and after him defender Maxim Bokov, midfielder Dmitry Khomukha and forward Vladimir Kulik left the St. Petersburg club for the Moscow club. Three players of the main team. Bokov and Kulik are graduates of St. Petersburg football and accompanied the team from relegation to the First League in 1992 until its return to the elite in 1995. In addition, Kulik was Zenit’s top scorer.
“Pavel Fedorovich said this: ‘Don’t interfere, this is not your war. ’ But we believed that if we trusted our mentor, we should follow him to the end. We were preparing for the season with Anatoly Byshovets, he knew that as soon as the legal issues in Moscow were resolved, we would go to Sadyrin at CSKA, but he tried his best to stop us. We talked a lot, Anatoly Fedorovich promised a lot, but everything outweighed his trust in Sadyrin. We made our choice, and I still think it was the right one,” Bokov said years later about his transfer to CSKA.
Maxim Bokov and Vladimir Kulik
Photo: pfc-cska.com
As for transfers from CSKA to Zenit, before Randjelovic there were only three such transfers in the history of Russia. In 1994, Armenian defender Ervand Krbashyan, having lost his place in the army team, moved to the St. Petersburg club, which then played in the First League. But he did not stay there for long either: he played for only six months.
In 1995, defender Dmitry Bystrov followed the same path. The USSR champion of the 1991 season and participant of the 1992/1993 Champions League, in which the military team sensationally knocked out Barcelona, responded to the request of his former coach Sadyrin to help return Zenit to the elite. CSKA no longer needed the experienced defender, who had problems with the regime. But he helped Zenit a lot: he became one of the leaders of the team that returned to the top league.
Before the 1997 season, forward Vladimir Lebed moved from the Moscow club to the St. Petersburg club. He spent two seasons at CSKA, where he started well, and even earned a call-up to the Russian national team (he played one match with Oleg Romantsev), but then gave up, largely due to injury. Byshovets invited Lebed to Zenit, but Vladimir did not last there either: he lasted only one season and scored only two goals in 25 matches.
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In the 21st century, after the deal with Randjelovic, the transfer had to wait so long that a whole generation of fans grew up who did not see the transfers between CSKA and Zenit. During this period, there were some movements only at the level of youth teams. The most unusual is the signing in 2016 of 18-year-old Englishman Jacob Gardiner-Smith to the St. Petersburg club, who previously coached in the CSKA youth team. The midfielder played several times for the blue and whites in the MFL (Youth Football League). Gardiner-Smith then played in the lower divisions of the English Championship and in 2024 joined Sholing from the seventh league.
However, in 2007, a high-profile transfer of defender Sergei Ignashevich from CSKA to Zenit almost happened. The Russian national team player could leave the Moscow club after a conflict with Gazzaev. Ignashevich was not happy with the coach because he spared many Brazilians: Vagner Love, Jo and Ramon.
“I told him: ‘The Brazilians get away with everything. ’ – “Why do you think I’m to blame for this?” – “So you’re the head coach!” We talked like men, but properly. Over time, I realized that this conversation did not spare me. Soon Giner called and said: “There is an offer from Zenit. If you want, we can let you go,” Ignashevich said. However, at that time the defender refused to move from Moscow to St. Petersburg. I was thinking of moving to Europe.
How Ignashevich almost became a Zenit player:
“Giner said: ‘If you want, we’ll let you go.’ Ignashevich was on the verge of leaving CSKA twice for Zenit
The “Pact” did not prohibit the leaders of CSKA and Zenit from properly negotiating player transfers. For example, in 2019 the clubs discussed a deal for Fernandez for 30 million euros, but Mario stayed, so the long pause in the transfer history of the Army and St. Petersburg team was interrupted by the transfer of not the “Russian Brazilian”, but Krugovoi.
* The text uses quotes from interviews with Gorodovoy.ru, Petersburg Diary and Sport Express.
