A forward you don't sign for two goals
Before the biography, here is the key point. Golenkov is one of the RPL forwards most often sent into aerial duels: in 2025/26 he had 19.5 such duels per 90 minutes against Offor's 15.4, with a 42.7% success rate against 41.0%. At the start of the current season the gap in percentage is even starker: 55.0% for Golenkov against 44.1%. At the same time, on goals and xG Offor is ahead of him in both periods, and there's nothing to argue about there yet. What emerges is a division of roles, not one forward being upgraded by another: Offor is sharper in front of goal, Golenkov goes into aerial duels far more often and wins more of them by volume. In one interview he described his own role more precisely than any scout could: he combines the functions of a "target man" and a "battering-ram type", meaning he's simultaneously the target for crosses and a forward of direct pressure. What follows is how he got there.
The boy from the Konoplev academy
Golenkov is 27, from Samara, a graduate of the Yuri Konoplev academy; his front three included future national team player Maksim Glushenkov and Grulyov, with Lomaev in goal. He himself has called the school one of the best in the country and compared its set-up to Sergei Galitsky's Krasnodar academy: in his words, both were lucky to have an "interested party" at the top, ready to invest in infrastructure and not just in the signboard.
At 15 he went for a ten-day trial with Sporting's youth side in Lisbon, the contract didn't materialise, and the road led to the Krylia Sovetov reserves, where he was invited by the Belgian Frank Vercauteren. His Samara youth had its own anxious story too: for a long time he feared the coaching staff treated him worse than the other academy players, because most of his teammates had one agent and he had another. "It got lodged in my head that I was being treated wrongly because I was from a different agency," he admitted later. It was this paranoia, by his own account, that pushed him to agree to his first loan, not a decision by the coaching staff.
RPL debut: October 2016, aged 17. By 2019/20 he had established himself in the first team: 52 matches and 17 goals for Krylia. In November 2018 he scored 4 in one match of the youth championship, made the top three scorers of the youth RPL, won the 2020/21 FNL with the club and reached the Russian Cup final. He played 2 matches for the U-20 national team in 2018.
The banquet that turned out to be premature
In the summer of 2020 Golenkov lived through one of the most painful and at the same time absurd episodes of his career. The RPL season was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. The RFU cancelled the relegation play-offs between the 13th- and 14th-placed Premier League teams and the 3rd- and 4th-placed FNL teams, leaving only the direct relegation of the bottom two clubs. Krylia Sovetov finished 15th and, on sporting merit, were heading to the FNL along with Orenburg. Rotor and second-placed Khimki were due to come up in their place.
Then the administrative merry-go-round began. Because of problems with funding and licensing, Khimki kept turning down promotion and then agreeing to it again. On 20 July several sources reported that the Moscow-region club definitively wouldn't go up to the RPL. For Krylia that meant salvation without a play-off, simply because another club had declined. In Samara they believed their place in the elite had been preserved, and, according to Golenkov, the team even managed to celebrate it with a banquet.
The party lasted two days. On 22 July it emerged that the funds needed for Khimki to take part in the RPL had been found after all. The Moscow-region club accepted promotion, and Krylia became the second team relegated from the league. It stung all the more because the Samara side had come alive towards the end: the club parted with Miodrag Božović, brought in Andrei Talalaev, and results picked up, but their final fate was decided not by their own match but by a financial decision in the Moscow region.
A year later the team answered on the pitch. In 2020/21 Krylia won the FNL with games to spare and reached the Russian Cup final along the way. Golenkov walked the whole road with the club, from a banquet for a rescue that never happened to a real return to the Premier League that nobody could cancel with an administrative decision.
The Europe that didn't work out
At 18 Golenkov went on loan to União de Leiria in Portugal. The expectations were Hollywood, the reality a pitch five kilometres from home with an artificial surface of "dreadful quality", which he first ran to on foot and then bought a bicycle for. On the plus side, he learned Portuguese almost better than English.
The second attempt, Sigma Olomouc in the Czech Republic in the summer of 2021, turned into a far heavier story. A club without its own training base, sessions at the stadium, then a knee injury, and the attitude changed sharply: they dragged their feet over an MRI, and sent the results in Czech without a translation. It reached the point where he literally had nothing to live on: he had to go to the club office, where they handed him part of the money for food. Golenkov flew to Munich and had a scan done at his own expense. And when he decided to return to Russia for his rehabilitation, it turned out the club had never sorted his work visa in three months. He was detained at the border: an escort, hands behind his head, fingerprints, and only after that was the visa extended. His wages from the Czech Republic, he says, he never received in full.
After that story he decided not to go to Europe again, though he admitted the dream of playing there remained despite all the negative experience. A separate dream is to play for Newcastle: the club walks out to the same Carmina Burana by Carl Orff that once played at Krylia's stadium.
Five years at Rostov
In the winter of 2021/22 Golenkov signed a contract with Rostov running to 31 December 2027 and stayed there wearing number 69. His club totals: 165 matches, 31 goals, 19 assists in all competitions; in the league alone, 115 matches, 18 goals, 10 assists, with a Transfermarkt valuation of 1.7 million euros.
*Rating is the Sofascore metric. FotMob ratings for the same matches may differ because of a different calculation method.
The 2022/23 seasonwas the one when Karpin's Rostov went into the winter break third in the RPL: 35 points after 17 rounds. In spring the team slipped to fourth. In that same stretch Golenkov, according to Championat, was considered the top scorer of the Russian Cup at that stage of the competition, even though in the RPL he had a modest 719 minutes and 3 goals.
In the autumn of 2023, in his best form, he was averaging a goal every 109 minutes, the second-best figure in the league over that stretch after Cassierra (97.4 minutes). One match from that run stands out on its own: a brace against CSKA after coming off the bench in round 16. Before the match he was more afraid not of the opponent but of the plane landing in Moscow in a strong wind — "I don't much like flying, especially in weather like that" — and he assessed both goals soberly: "Luck was a big factor in those goals, there were deflections, the ball bounced exactly to me."
The captain's armband is a different story, from the later 2025/26 season, when Rostov were managed by Jonatan Alba. The team went into the break 11th with 21 points, and it was in that season that Golenkov came out several times wearing the armband in place of the injured Kuchaev. He explained it like this: "I was ready for that kind of responsibility before the season... I had experience at youth level, when I was at the Konoplev Academy." That was also when he corrected an RB Sport journalist: "I didn't score 2 goals in the autumn, I scored 4 — there were more in the Russian Cup."
For years the main topic of his interviews was the competition with Nikolai Komlichenko for the centre-forward spot: in April 2024 Golenkov honestly admitted he was "a bit tired of questions about competition". A curious detail for the contrast in characters: Komlichenko himself stressed that he didn't consider Rostov a family, calling it a "collective", whereas Golenkov, on the contrary, spoke about the club almost tenderly: "You could say Rostov became my dad, and Samara is my motherland." Former national team player Igor Semshov in 2025 called the Golenkov–Komlichenko pair the strongest in the RPL, although Vladimir Granat disputed it, considering the Azmoun–Bukharov partnership of years past more powerful.
On the national team he speaks without illusions: "If I've scored two goals, it means they don't call me up. If I score 15 in a season, they won't be able not to." In spring 2025 Championat separately examined why Karpin, the coach who knows Golenkov better than anyone, had never called him up to the national team. Asked about the comparison with Pogrebnyak in terms of build, Golenkov replied: "Very flattering, but in terms of level I'm a long way off him yet. I need to work."
Off the pitch he is pointedly modest: he has said he could live on roughly 100 thousand roubles a month if living alone, and prefers quiet Rostov to noisy Moscow — "there isn't the bustle here that you get in the capital". He isn't afraid of being funny and awkward: in Rostov's New Year video for the Pole Chudes game show he blurted out the letter "soft sign" at random while trying to guess the surname Inzaghi. On long bus journeys he reads, from Ibrahimović's autobiography to travelogues, and plays cards with teammates, learning bridge. He opened a padel club in Samara because there was nowhere to play in Rostov: "It's an investment in sport, I hope I'm doing a good thing," he says.
As recently as August 2026 Lokomotiv offered 200 million roubles for him, according to media reports, but Rostov asked for no less than 400 million, and the deal didn't happen. Later the transfer to Baltika, according to insider information, closed at roughly 150 million.
Golenkov against Offor: the full picture
Let's return to the numbers in more detail. They're taken from comparative scouting reports for the 2025/26 and 2026/27 seasons, where both forwards are measured by a single methodology. All volume metrics are per 90 minutes.
The 2025/26 season (all competitions):
Two unexpected conclusions. First: Offor is objectively sharper in finishing in both periods, and that's a stable trait, not a quirk of the sample. Second: Golenkov is nonetheless not "second choice" on the other parameters: he shoots more often, passes more accurately, goes into aerial duels far more often and wins more of them by volume, and last season only he was providing assists.
Both forwards can be the first target of a long pass, both compete a lot, both fit direct attacking football, but the emphases differ. Offor more often attacks free space and takes the episode through to a shot. Golenkov is the more reliable first target for a high ball: he wins the duel, lays it off to teammates, starts the attack with a pass. For Talalaev this isn't a replacement but a choice to suit the match scenario.
What Kaliningrad gets
Baltika gets an experienced forward: 189 cm, right-footed, schooled in Karpin's pressing. The player's representative, Andrei Talaev, called the move "a new challenge" that Golenkov intends to prove himself worthy of on the pitch.
Behind this transfer is a man who has been through the genuine rock bottom of European postings, was scared of a plane landing before an important match and still went out and scored a brace, yet lost neither his humour nor his curiosity about the world. The question now isn't even which of the two forwards is stronger. What's more interesting is how quickly Talalaev works out in which matches he needs Offor and in which he needs Golenkov.
