Fyodor Cherenkov


Fyodor Fyodorovich Cherenkov was a Soviet and Russian football midfielder who played for Spartak Moscow and Red Star Football Club.

Playing career

Cherenkov made 34 appearances for the Soviet Union national football team, scoring 12 goals. Although widely regarded by Spartak's fans as team's best player ever, he was always dropped by the national team on the eve of several major tournaments, including two World Cups and a European Championship. For the time spent in Spartak he received the Club Loyalty Award in 1989. He was an incredible passer and was also great at shooting the ball and scored many goals. Cherenkov worked as a coach of Spartak's reserve team after retiring. He was awarded "The Attack Organizer" award in 1988 and 1989, as the most useful attack player. In his history of Spartak, Robert Edelman described him as "the longest-serving and most beloved of all Spartakovtsy":
A native Muscovite, Fiodr Cherenkov was a product of Spartak's school. Navigating between midfield and forward, he played with an originality and eccentricity that endeared him to the public. Cherenkov was an enigmatic and fragile personality whose capacity for unexpected improvisation fit the Spartak image of the player as romantic artist. A true original, he was the embodiment of what many of Spartak's male Moscow supporters liked to believe about themselves. Lacking great speed but quick on his feet, small of stature but possessed of great guile, Cherenkov seemed to practice a new kind of masculinity, that of the urban trickster. By the time his Spartak career was over, he was the leading point producer in the team's history.

Honours