Prepare for a deep dive 😁

A small warning before we begin!

Counting the academies of Russian footballers is an activity from roughly the same category as sorting out an old box of cables: everything seems to be right in front of you, but ten minutes in you no longer know which cord goes to what, why it's tied in a knot, and who decided this needed sorting out in the first place.

Youth pathways in Russian football are a similar story. One source says the player was at one school. A second adds two more. A third remembers a boarding school. A fourth is silent on dates. A fifth offers a handsome biography but no answer to the main question: how many years did he actually spend at that academy, and how many was he merely registered there, training there, going for a trial or passing through in transit.

So this text is not a notarised register of graduates. Nor is it an attempt to settle once and for all who owns each footballer: Zenit, Krasnodar, CSKA, Lokomotiv, the Konoplev Academy, Chertanovo or the first coach at the district youth school who actually got him hooked on football in the first place.

It's more of an aerial snapshot of the terrain. A little hazy, approximate in places, but useful all the same. It shows not the absolute truth but the overall picture: which schools appear most often in the biographies of RPL players, where the main interchange stations are, who produces footballers for themselves and who produces them for the whole league.

All the numbers below are best read exactly that way: an approximate map of the system, not a court ruling on every route. Because in Russian youth football exact dates tend to dissolve somewhere between "trained there", "went through the school", "was in the system" and "was considered a graduate". And those, it turns out, are four different kinds of truth.

And of course, alongside the text I've prepared a gift for you: an interactive page, with player photos, and just pleasant to the touch -https://rpl-academies.vercel.app/

I hope you remember part one? 😁 It's waiting patiently for you here - https://www.sports.ru/football/blogs/3413045.html

Off we go 😎

Zenit and Krasnodar as two poles, the Konoplev Academy as an interchange, and how the Moscow schools feed half the league

Open the squad list of, say, Orenburg or Sochi and go through the biographies, and the same story emerges every time: half the players once grazed in the academies of Zenit, Krasnodar, Lokomotiv or CSKA. Those four schools, plus Spartak, Dynamo, the Konoplev Academy and Chertanovo, hold up the entire skeleton of the league.

I took 297 Russians from the squad lists of the 16 RPL clubs of the 2025/26 season (the snapshot is updated to 2 July 2026, taking in the winter moves, in particular Barinov and Kozlov to CSKA) and reconstructed each one's youth pathway: every school and academy he passed through. Below is an attempt to put into words what it shows. We count the leading academy as the longest youth school on the route; a touch is when an academy appears at any stage. Those who grew up in Belarus or Ukraine and were never considered products of the Russian system are left out.

The top eight that holds up the whole league

Eight academies (Zenit, Krasnodar, CSKA, Lokomotiv, Spartak, Dynamo, the Konoplev Academy and Chertanovo) raised a combined 174 of the league's current players. That's 58.6% of all Russians in the RPL. The remaining 41% is a scattering from Anzhi, Rostov, Rubin, Master-Saturn of Yegoryevsk and dozens of schools that each gave the league one or two people.

Inside this eight there's an internal logic that is rarely stated outright. The first four names, Zenit, Krasnodar, CSKA, Lokomotiv, are classic club factories: their own money, their own philosophy, their own vertical from school to first team. The fifth and sixth, Spartak and Dynamo, are old Soviet brands that badly botched their youth work in the 2010s and are only now beginning to climb out. And the seventh and eighth, Konoplev and Chertanovo, aren't club academies at all: one is a Samara non-profit with a rotating cast of partners, the other a state boarding school run by the Moscow sports department. They have neither a team of their own in the RPL nor any brief to stock one. And yet they share the same top table with the big clubs.

That's the first important conclusion. The Russian league stands not just on eight schools but on two fundamentally different models. The club model, where the academy serves the parent club. And the municipal-transit model, where the school consciously prepares a player "for export". And the second model, unlike the first, is funded by nobody as a strategic project: it runs on inertia, on enthusiast coaches, and on the status of "Primorsky near Tolyatti" as a place several generations of scouts have got used to visiting.

Krasnodar: an institute, not an academy

Krasnodar has 31 graduates in the league. Eight at home, another 23 scattered across 11 clubs, from Kaliningrad to Orenburg. In absolute numbers that's not a record; Zenit has produced more. But by the measure of "share of your own in your own squad", Krasnodar is the only club in the top half of the table where two-thirds of the Russian contingent are homegrown: Spertsyan, Agkatsev, Chernikov, Khmarin, Mukailov, Guseinov, Stezhko, Burkin. Two of them are 18-19-year-old youngsters; some have long formed the Russian core of the first team.

That's exactly what sets Krasnodar apart from every other big academy in the country. They didn't just raise Spertsyan. Year after year they reproduce a vertical in which a small boy is guided for many years and released into the league instead of buying a ready-made foreigner. La Masia can do that, Athletic can, Ajax can. In Russia, only in the south.

At the same time Galitsky also feeds half the league. Krasnodar products in Kaliningrad, three in Sochi, five in Orenburg. And these aren't factory rejects but perfectly regular starters: Volkov, Litvinov, Ignatyev, Utkin, Manelov, Ilya Petrov. Hence the second conclusion: the Krasnodar model works not because it "keeps everyone" but because it keeps as many as the first team needs and sells the rest at a profit. Knowing how to let go is as much a part of the system as knowing how to raise.

Zenit: a conveyor belt that doesn't eat its own produce

With Zenit the story is the diametric opposite. The Petersburg academy has 34 graduates in the RPL and 44 touches across the routes, first in the league on both metrics. But at Zenit itself only three of those 34 play: Kondakov, Shilov, Mikhailov. Two of them are 18-year-old reserves the first team doesn't yet trust. Retention: just 8.8%.

What does that mean in practice? That of ten Zenit graduates, nine finish their careers playing for somebody else. Five in Sochi, five in Rostov, four at Dynamo Makhachkala, three each at Pari NN, Rubin and others. There's a joke about Zenit being a branch of the St Petersburg gas distribution company, but by academy standards it's unfair: this school works for the whole country.

An awkward question suggests itself here. The club with the best infrastructure, the most expensive coaches and the money produces more players for the league than anyone and keeps fewer than anyone. It isn't that the academy is bad. It's that Zenit finds it easier to buy a finished player than to wait five years for its own. As long as this works at the level of results (titles, the title race, the dominance of recent years), everything's fine. But structurally the Petersburg model means one thing: the main producer of Russian footballers consciously hands its graduates to its rivals. The whole league is fed by the club that has won it most often since 2019.

A separate strand within this plot is the quiet exchange between Petersburg and Krasnodar. Sergei Petrov is a Zenit graduate; Danila Kozlov also came through the Petersburg school but by winter 2026 had already left for CSKA. And that only reinforces the point: the routes of top-academy graduates have long lived above club borders. From exactly the other side, at Zenit sit Adamov and Latyshonok, both from the Krasnodar school. No loud transfers, all of it through youth football. The country's main rivalry is partly decided by proxy at 14-15, when a boy from the provinces chooses Petersburg or Krasnodar.

The Konoplev Academy and Chertanovo: transit terminals

Two academies in the top eight don't belong to RPL clubs, and both do what club schools don't: they systematically pass children on. The Konoplev Academy near Tolyatti has 14 graduates in the league and 21 touches across the routes. From 2003 to 2022 this academy changed partners three times (private owners, Abramovich's National Football Academy, the Samara region), and since summer 2022 it has worked in tandem with FC Akron. No investment manifestos, no "Centres of Football Excellence". Just scouts, a boarding school and the systematic distribution of talent to the Moscow, Petersburg and Krasnodar academies.

Take the route of Maksim Glushenkov: Smolensk, the Konoplev Academy, Lokomotiv, Chertanovo, Zenit. Five addresses before adult football, each of which added something of its own to the player, and without any one of them he'd hardly be where he is now. Or Nikita Yermakov: Syzran, the Konoplev Academy, Krasnodar, CSKA, Pari NN. Or Ilzat Akhmetov, who travelled from Bishkek via Konoplev to Rubin and Krylia. These aren't career disasters; they're normal stories about how a child from the provinces gets to the RPL via four changes of train.

Chertanovo has 11 graduates and 20 touches, and it works on the same logic, only in Moscow. In its own way that's even more remarkable: a municipal boarding school in the south-west of the capital, with no club money, stands in the same row as the Dynamo and Spartak academies. Before their main careers, Matvei Kislyak (then CSKA), Sergei Pinyaev (Krylia, then Lokomotiv), Danil Prutsev (Spartak), Maksim Glushenkov and Yuri Gorshkov (Zenit) all passed through Chertanovo. Andrei Lunev is listed in most biographies as a product of the Torpedo FShM, but the Chertanovo centre also figures on his youth route. Nobody funds this school as a priority project, but in practice it's half the skeleton of Moscow football.

Hence the third conclusion, probably the most uncomfortable for those responsible for developing the game. The two main interchange stations of Russian youth football are neither club-owned nor private. One is an old non-profit in the Samara region, the other a school within the Moscow sports department. If Akron folds in Tolyatti tomorrow and Moscow decides to "optimise" Chertanovo, half the league loses a chunk of its biography. And there is no backup.

Moscow as a logistics hub

Add up all the touches of the Moscow academies (Lokomotiv, CSKA, Spartak, Dynamo, Chertanovo, Master-Saturn in Yegoryevsk) and you get 147 players: half the league has passed through the capital at least once. Petersburg adds another 54, of whom 13 have been through both. The average RPL player, if he's not from Krasnodar or Makhachkala, is a boy who was taken from his region to Moscow at 10-14 and, five or so years later, was either kept in the system or distributed onwards.

Lokomotivremains one of the sanest machines of the four Moscow academies. Some graduates play at home (Batrakov and several members of the first-team rotation), the rest are spread across a dozen clubs, three or four each at Pari NN, Orenburg and Krylia. So the railwaymen feed themselves and feed the neighbours at the same time. But Barinov is no longer an example of retention, rather the opposite: in January 2026 the captain, guided for years through Moscow-region schools and the Lokomotiv system, left for CSKA on a contract to 2029. So even the academy's symbol can go to a direct competitor. In the same row are CSKA (26 graduates, 9 at home) and Spartak (19 and 5): both have a lower share of their own, and both effectively operate as big transit points. Pomazun and Zabolotny are now at Spartak, though they grew up in the CSKA system. Anton Miranchuk is a Spartak graduate playing for Dynamo. Dzyuba and both Bakaevs are signed up at Akron and Lokomotiv. These aren't isolated oddities; they're the norm.

Here it's worth saying something that usually stays between the lines. There's long been no "Spartak football" or "Lokomotiv school" as a school of distinct style in the league. There is a common Moscow model in which a graduate of any of the four big academies can end up anywhere by the age of 20, right down to the club next door. The individual brands remain on the shirts. The industry is shared by all.

Clubs without an academy: half the league

The fifth observation concerns clubs that have almost no homegrown players in the first team at all. Sochi, Akhmat, Akron, Baltika are four teams where the share of their own is close to zero. Pari NN has 5.6%. Dynamo Makhachkala 10%. Orenburg 11.5%. That's seven clubs out of sixteen, meaning almost half the league is made up of teams assembled entirely on the transfer market.

On the one hand, that's logical: Sochi, Akron and Dynamo Makhachkala don't really have academies as such yet, they're still being built. Baltika has a school, but in this snapshot it hasn't yet produced players who've established themselves in an RPL squad; the lads there are growing, though, and it will show soon. On the other hand, these clubs play a vital role in the ecosystem. They are the ones who take in those discarded by Zenit, Spartak, CSKA and Lokomotiv. At Sochi, five Zenit products, four from Chertanovo and three from Krasnodar play at the same time. At Orenburg, five from Krasnodar, four from Lokomotiv, three from Zenit. These clubs are essentially the league's second wave: those who made it to the RPL but didn't break into the first teams of the big academies.

And here comes the fourth conclusion: without the "academy-less" clubs, the system as a whole doesn't work. If Sochi and Baltika suddenly decided to take only "their own", half the players of Zenit and Lokomotiv simply wouldn't have careers. The export clubs, usually spoken of with mild condescension, are the load-bearing structure. They absorb the surplus of the top academies.

The youth: the same picture

Look only at players under 21 (there are 88 in the database) and the top-eight picture barely changes. Zenit is first here too, with 14 graduates. Krasnodar and CSKA 9 each. Dynamo and Lokomotiv 5 each. Spartak 4. Konoplev 3. Chertanovo 2.

The only point worth noting: of Zenit's 14 youngsters whose leading academy is the Petersburg one, two play at the club itself, both 18. That means in two or three years everything will be exactly the same: the Petersburg school will keep producing more than anyone, keep the minimum at home, and the league will keep living off the feed. If Petersburg consciously wants to change something, the effect won't show before the 2028/29 season. Until then there's nowhere for a structural shift to come from.

The only club whose youth line genuinely hints at a change of model is Spartak. Just four of its under-21 graduates are in the league. That's fewer than Dynamo and Lokomotiv, and half as many as CSKA. Either the academy is worse at finding talent or worse at bringing it through. For a club with Cherenkov and Titov in its history, four in the youth cohort is a diagnosis. And judging by the fact that some of its "own" 18-year-olds (Polekh, Massalyga) passed through Krasnodar before Spartak, the problem sits at the level of children's scouting.

Long routes: geography as biography

A separate layer is those with four or more youth schools in their biography. There are 59 of them in the league, one in five. Dmitri Barinov, before he ended up at Lokomotiv and then, in winter 2026, at CSKA, went through several Moscow-region schools (Shchyolkovo, Fryazino, Master-Saturn of Yegoryevsk) and only then entered the railwaymen's system. Gleb Popolitov was born in Lipetsk, took his first football steps through the Khokholsky youth school and Voronezh's SDYuSShOR No. 15, and also went through six schools to get to CSKA.

What unites these long routes? Practically none of them has a home town in Moscow or Petersburg. These are stories of relocation from Siberia, from the south, from the Volga region, from Kemerovo, Smolensk, Bishkek, Syzran. Among the 59 "long biographies" I found almost none where the child was born in the capital and simply switched between capital schools. Capital kids more often take the short trajectory of "yard, academy, first team", three or four links. Long routes are about the regions.

And that, perhaps, is the main quiet truth of Russian football. The top eight academies are the shop window. The real work goes on among hundreds of coaches at village youth schools who put a ten-year-old boy with a bag on a train and send him to Tolyatti or Moscow. Khokholsky, Mech of Yefremov, Triumf of Mostovskoy, Okean of Nakhodka, Kirovets of St Petersburg, Tasma of Kazan, Zvezda of Irkutsk, FC Achinsk, from which Ivan Ignatyev was taken and handed to Krasnodar in 2012: these hundreds of dots are the capillaries of the system. As long as they're alive, there'll be someone to come after Spertsyan. If they start to disappear, no Krasnodar academy will carry the country.

A five-level hierarchy

If you try to fold it all into one diagram, you get the following structure.

Level one is the two true factories: Krasnodar (produces and keeps) and Zenit (produces and gives away). Together they supply almost one in five players in the league.

Level two is the four old capital academies: Lokomotiv, CSKA, Spartak, Dynamo. All lose most of their graduates, but it's they who carry the entire migration of players within the league.

Level three is the transit points: the Konoplev Academy, Chertanovo, Master-Saturn of Yegoryevsk. Not club-owned, no big budgets, but without them half the biographies in the first two levels wouldn't exist.

Level four is the regional academies of RPL clubs: Rostov, Rubin, Krylia, Dynamo Makhachkala, Orenburg. They supply 20-30% of their own squad and assemble the rest on the market.

Level five is the clubs with no notable output in the current RPL squad: Sochi, Baltika, Akron, Pari NN, Akhmat. Not necessarily without a school as an institution, but without homegrown players who've become part of the team here and now. Their role in the system is the same: take in others' players who didn't break through and give them chances.

What follows from this? Russian football in the 2025/26 season rests on eight schools, but three of them have no club of their own in the RPL, and of the remaining five club academies, four consciously give away most of their graduates. In effect the league operates on the logic of one big academy for the whole country, with branches scattered from Petersburg to Tolyatti, and an RPL team is just a shop window where those branches are assembled in different proportions every summer.

And if tomorrow someone wants to repeat Krasnodar's success, that is, to build an academy that produces a lot and keeps most of it, the task will come down not to money, not to infrastructure and not even to coaches. It will come down to philosophy. To the club ceasing to see its own eighteen-year-old as a less convenient option than a bought thirty-year-old foreigner. Galitsky managed it in fifteen years. The rest haven't even started.

What this analysis does NOT say

I counted a snapshot, the 2025/26 season squads. Spartak has 2007-2008 birth years who could change the picture in two or three years. At Dynamo Makhachkala the academy's first generation is only just reaching the RPL. Baltika's school is working but has no output in the league yet. Everything could shift.

I didn't assess quality. Zenit's 34 graduates include notable RPL first-teamers and an 18-year-old reserve somewhere in the depths of the league. By minutes the hierarchy would surely look different, and not in favour of the Petersburg conveyor belt.

And I'm not trying to award any academy "supremacy forever". In five years everything could change. If Krasnodar gets two or three consecutive intakes wrong tomorrow, Dynamo keeps holding 50% of its own and Spartak finds a way to bring its own through to the first team, the top-eight picture will be different.

But one thing will certainly remain. As long as the Konoplev Academy and Chertanovo, the Khokholsky youth school and FC Achinsk exist in this country, as long as a twelve-year-old boy from Siberia is put on a train to be taken to a coach two thousand kilometres away, Russian football will come from somewhere. As soon as those capillaries dry up, no Zenit money and no Krasnodar philosophy will save the league.

The interactive version, with filters by club and academy and the full pathway of each of the 297 players - https://rpl-academies.vercel.app/

And my Telegram is here - https://t.me/BalticaB