There is one thing about this season that will have to be admitted, like it or not.
When I watch Andrei Talalaev finishing the season sixth with Baltika (with this blue-and-white team of ours, as boring to the neutral as a well-run factory floor can be boring), one parallel from a completely different field keeps forcing its way into my head. I think of Shnurov. I know the comparison is odd, but I can't shake it. In the early 2000s respectable publications wrote the same thing about Leningrad, and rather squeamishly: swearing, drink, a tavern, zero culture, clowning for drunken corporate parties. At best, "a phenomenon of its time", implying that time would somehow pass and the phenomenon would evaporate. Nashe Radio played half the songs with so many bleeps in place of words that sometimes all that was left of a song was the rhythm and the chorus, and this was served up as a separate disgrace. Fifteen years or so went by, and it turned out that "V Pitere – pit'", "WWW" and "Terminator" had been quoted to pieces, including by people who would never admit to liking Shnurov out loud. Shnurov himself, as we know, sits on the jury of The Voice, is on television in prime time and on every cover going; and it turned out along the way that he sang about that decade in this country more accurately than half of those who were considered real artists at the time.
The quality of the work was judged not by the work, but by whose name was in the credits and what position that person was in at the moment. It happens like that a lot with us: the name outweighs the craft, and those who try to redo the arithmetic aren't listened to — what's the point of listening if the sentence has already been signed and the hearing closed long ago.
With Talalaev, for the last few years, I've had exactly the same feeling.
Here it's customary to think that a coach is defined by his place in the table at the moment of his sacking. Sacked from bottom place means, as we so elegantly put it, he "buried the team". Nothing else fits into that short line: not the squad, not the infrastructure, not the budget, not the season, not the club's internal crisis, not even the state the team was in when the coach got it. Talalaev was sacked several times. The most memorable, of course, was Torpedo: arrived in autumn 2022, by March it was one win in twelve matches, termination by mutual consent, six months' salary in severance, and somewhere in the middle the story of how the coach didn't fly to Grozny for the Akhmat game because the medical staff "recommended bed rest". Then Khimki and the 2024 Cup: knocked out by Rostov on penalties, Karpin sent off, Talalaev handed a two-match suspended ban and a twenty-thousand fine for "insulting behaviour towards other persons", and after the game his now-textbook line about referee Sukhoi: "Before this Sukhoi removed one First League team, now a second. What questions can there be?" Then a couple more stories, all roughly in the same genre. And every time the discussion collapsed into a set of words: hot-headed, shouty, an FNL coach, well, you get the idea.
Someone occasionally remembered: in Tambov he took over a team seventeenth in the First League and two seasons later dragged it into the play-offs for the RPL. Well yes, came the reply; well done, of course. That at Pyunik, under him, the Armenian club got through two rounds of Europa League qualifying for the first time in its history (knocking out, mind you, both Vardar and Tobol) also fell out of the conversation within half a minute. Details; a label has no need of details, that much is clear.
That's how it went, I repeat, for many years. And this season the backdrop shifted, and shifted, let's be frank, without any delicacy.
Baltika finished sixth. For an RPL newcomer that is — and let Sports.ru's statistics department correct me — the best result in twenty-three years. In round three the team took Spartak apart at the Lukoil Arena without much ceremony: 3:0, with Saus's goal going into the same general pot of good mood. In round seventeen, at home, Baltika beat that same Spartak 1:0 — playing with ten men from the middle of the first half, because Talalaev, right then, got sent off.
In April the coach was suspended again, and on top of that he dropped out for a couple of weeks: he went in for a planned operation. Baltika, entirely unruffled, went to Krasnodar without him and brought back a 2:2. In May Talalaev was given the Silver Doe.
Somewhere in between all this, a clause turned up in his contract that I'll come back to separately: those 3.5% of the profit from sales. Saus and Andrade were leaving: the first to Spartak for 350 million roubles, the second to Zenit for three and a half million euros. By the end of May Talalaev's name had flickered through the shortlists of two clubs playing in Europe at once, Slovenia's Celje and Greece's PAOK; and it got there, as far as I understand, without any active agent and without any loud statements on his part.
A build-it-yourself season, in short. And all of it, I repeat, was done and lived through by one and the same man whom, a year and a half ago, most fans still filed under "hysteric who lost it".
Here, and in our football especially, it's customary to believe that the result decides everything, writes off everything and explains everything. Play it through in your head — I'm sure you've already done it for me — what would have happened if Baltika had slumped into the bottom half in spring. Temperament, everyone would have said. Couldn't control himself again; how long can this go on; we did tell you. And he has no business in the RPL, of course; we explained that to you, in case you missed it, all season long.
A defeat is a defeat, and so on. Temperament conveniently explains everything, including the things it doesn't actually explain.
Most of our football conversation rests on this logic; and a simple, rather boring thing gets lost in it. The place in the table at the moment of sacking doesn't describe the coach. It describes the situation the coach was called into. Talalaev, if you look honestly, was almost always called to where things were already on fire. To Tambov, in seventeenth place. To Khimki, to rescue them; a second time, for full conviction. To Akhmat, in the relegation zone. To Torpedo, also in the relegation zone. He was called in as a fireman, handed gloves and a hose; then people were surprised he didn't carry the cat and three points out of the burning house.
Baltika, as far as I can judge, became the first job in many years where he didn't have to put anything out. Here they wanted something else from him: to build something. Building and firefighting are different occupations altogether, and as a rule you look for different people for them.
Talalaev's story goes like this. He took over Baltika in the First League, eight months later took it into the RPL with two rounds to spare, and from that moment began doing things that, in our reality, are frankly strange to see from a league newcomer. The team sold players for more than it bought them. Held its structure through the bad stretches. Regularly took points off the big clubs. Didn't fall apart when the coach went up into the stands after a red; and — what I like even more — didn't fall apart when the coach was actually lying in hospital. By spring Baltika had moved into the top half of the table and made the league seriously discuss whether it might, after all, have to hand it the bronze.
After the 0:1 to Lokomotiv in round twenty-nine — the match in which that very bronze formally slipped away — Talalaev said a line that, if you like, can be written in as the epigraph to any piece about Baltika 25/26: "If Baltika had taken RPL bronze, half the league would have had to be disbanded." Sometimes it's surprising, even to yourself, how completely one person can close out a long sporting season with a single sentence.
Alongside all this sporting stuff, as I promised, a separate clause turned up in Talalaev's contract: those 3.5% of the profit from sales. According to insider Ivan Karpov, the same percentages are written into the deals of general director Izmailov and sporting director Margaryan; the whole scheme, by the same account, is signed off at the top, with Rostec. In a sense this is no longer a football contract; it is, forgive the word, a production contract. Here it usually goes like this: the coach wants a ready-made player, and he wants him now, not in two years, because in two years he'll be sacked — and statistically he won't survive until the sale. At Baltika, funnily enough, this scheme has been turned the other way round. Saus was seen off to Spartak mid-season for 350 million roubles; Andrade was handed to Zenit for 3.5 million euros. According to the same Karpov, Talalaev personally, on just two names — Saus and Pryakhin — pocketed about twelve million roubles, and some part of it, again according to the insider, went to his staff. On Andrade, if you count by the same logic, the sum also comes out pretty decent 😎
The one who earned it, as I said, is the same man who for more than ten years, in our conversations, was stubbornly denied the ability to build anything at all.
This is where the word "unbalanced" starts to become really awkward. A man described for a decade through a set of nervous breakdowns would, this season, be more honestly described through a calculation. This isn't "bring in your own guys, spend the budget, sell yourself on an agent's promises"; this is found — developed — carried through a first RPL season — sold — and with the proceeds he's looking at the next one. For our league, and I spent a long time choosing the word, this is still a rare phenomenon.
To be completely honest: I'm not sure Talalaev has noticeably changed inside this season. He argues with referees just the same, gets wound up with and without cause, talks at length, rarely doubts he's right — and can still turn a harmless throw-in in the 96th minute, as they wrote, into an incident with international resonance. Fine, not international — inter-club. This is the same coach who for years was fined, sent off and described with that very word we just agreed to avoid returning to where possible. What changed wasn't in him; it changed in us. In last place in the First League this behaviour is called hysteria; in sixth place in the RPL it's called passion. When a team goes down, the same coach "buried the club"; when a team sells players to Spartak and Zenit, the very same coach has suddenly "built a system". And that's how it works everywhere here, not only in football.
That's actually how it's arranged. To change his reputation, a coach doesn't need a new character, a new way of speaking or some anger-management course (let's leave those courses to the psychotherapists and the self-help hustlers). He needs one right club, one where your flaws happen to coincide with the task. For Talalaev that club was Baltika. I honestly don't see any football miracle here. One day a coach and a job simply coincided; it happens less often than you'd like, but it happens.
Let me write, if I may, about Allegri — for contrast. After every heavy defeat this spring Max had his own universal explanation, and by a strange coincidence everyone around him turned out to be at fault. The players relaxed after letting the Scudetto slip. The team didn't get into the game. There wasn't enough emotional energy on the night in question. This, as we understand, is the talk of a coach who has no intention of seeing the problem in himself. With Talalaev it's all the other way round. After that defeat to Lokomotiv and the bronze effectively lost, he didn't point to the squad. He said half the league needed disbanding. After that scuffle with CSKA, when he booted the ball into the stands and provoked a general conversation with Celestini, he didn't explain that he'd been misunderstood: he calmly admitted he'd been ready for a one-match ban for time-wasting and got four — and, by and large, accepted that too. It's some other type of coaching ego, and I don't know how to name it in one word, so I won't try.
As for the currently popular thesis about the inevitable "second-season flop", honestly, I'm sceptical. Saus and Andrade have already been taken from Baltika; someone else may well be taken too. That's almost always how it works here, nothing new in it. But Talalaev's own career has a quiet feature that people don't like discussing. His second seasons have often turned out stronger than his first. At Tambov he first hauled the team to fifth — and then, without any loud new inputs, to fourth. At Akhmat he first climbed to eleventh — and then to seventh. You can't call it a pattern; calling it a coincidence, for my taste, doesn't quite work either.
Asked about Baltika's next season, Talalaev — quite untypically for him — answered in literally one line: "Baltika will not be relegated next year." A man who usually assembles an extended piece of commentary out of any remark got by with seven words this time; to my ear, that's not bravado.
This, on the whole, is where we could stop. Talalaev has had, by any measure, one of the hardest seasons of his career: there was the operation, there were the suspensions, there was that bronze lost a round before the end, there were the team's two main stars leaving for clubs where he himself will hardly ever get to work. And in the same season he has the Silver Doe, the prize for coach of the year according to Match Premier, and a quiet place on the shortlist of a club that regularly plays in the Europa League group stage. How all this fits inside one person, I won't undertake to explain. Evidently that's what a season looks like in which the coach himself learned nothing new, and everyone else learned something about him.
Talalaev did not, of course, turn from a "hot-headed FNL coach" into a "systemic manager of European level" this season — we don't live in Hollywood, nobody transforms in twenty months here. It's us — those of us who for twelve years wrote "Talalaev" meaning the label — who suddenly realised you can write "Talalaev" meaning the coach.
On 6 September 2024 he turned fifty-one — not, frankly, an age for a fresh start with a First League team. An artificial joint, a long list of sackings behind him, a comfortable contract as a Match Premier pundit lying on the table at home. He could have gone nowhere; he could have stayed in the studio, the way dozens of former coaches stay, who, let's be honest, nobody invites anywhere any more. For some reason he went to Kaliningrad — to what is in effect another country, cut off from Moscow by borders, to a First League club, to a team the management was rumoured to be unhappy with.
Twenty months later he has the Silver Doe, sixth place in the RPL, the status of the league's best newcomer in twenty-three years, the operation behind him, PAOK's shortlist ahead.
Whatever happens next to him and to Baltika, he has already walked out of all the places he was so habitually kept in. Out of the FNL. Out of the "buried the team" genre. He hasn't walked out of the Match Premier studio, but now he's simply a pleasant addition to their programmes. 😏
