Sports
MOSCOW, (RIA Novosti football expert Marc...
game, Oleg Romantsev"s perestroika-era Spartak Moscow have so far been the only Russian side to reach the later stages of Europe"s leading club competition. With the Soviet Union heading for collapse, his side of technically-gifted players fell to Marseille in the semifinals of the 1990/91 tournament after knocking out Real Madrid in the previous round.Five years later, Spartak beat Blackburn Rovers, Legia Warsaw and Rosenborg home and away to claim a maximum 18 points in Champions League Group B. Unsurprisingly tipped as one of the potential winners of the tournament, financial problems meant that the club were forced to sell key players before the play-off stages, where they went out tamely to Nantes.
While it is as yet unclear what effect the crisis will have on Russian football, the national game looks unlikely to make a return to the cash-strapped 1990s. However, Simon Kuper, Financial Times sports writer and author of the forthcoming book, Why England Lose,
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