Football Season Guide

After enjoying a dream season and narrowly missing on the title Rostov are expectedly buoyant by the prospects of possible Champions League football and another season of great achievements. The fact that the extremely good coach Kurban Berdyev decided to stay must be pleasing everyone and even without any new signings Rostov’s compact bunch of players look ready to battle hard in every game. Exactly this dedication and tremendous workload saw the RSMs achieving what they achieved last term and with the likes of Navas, Noboa, Bastos, Kalachev, Poloz and Novoseltsev pledging loyalty to the squad the main core of players was preserved for now. This is very important as the major financial troubles continue and at the minute Rostov have a ban to register new players, which makes it impossible to strengthen the squad. This is likely to change once a few delayed payments are made and knowing Berdyev’s great reputation a name or two of top quality are likely to arrive. The gaffer’s main goal now is to secure the services of striker Azmoun, who was scoring at will last spring when enjoying a loan spell and it seems very likely that he will be a Rostov player again this year. The other striker up front is Bukharov, while behind the lone forward player usually operate a line of four midfielders led by Noboa and Gatcan. Rostov were very successful last season using 5-4-1 in every match and this almost certainly will remain unchanged. The problem that the players will face now is balancing their small squad between the league and Europe, plus the expectations after the second place are high and this brings unwanted pressure. The team overachieved in 2015/16 but it will be extremely difficult for them to repeat the same thing again and maybe the focus will be mostly on avoiding trouble.