Modern football clubs are increasingly reminiscent of professional media companies. In addition to "faster, higher, stronger" the commercial side is also important for the club. Sports, including football, are part of the entertainment industry, and a lot of money is spinning there. And the better a club works with the public, the more fans it has, the easier it is to monetize them, the more money the club has and the better the players playing there.
What are your favorite football teams, who are watched most willingly, who has the largest audience of loyal fans? IN the popularity rating of the best Russian football clubs in 2019 we have collected the teams most beloved by Russians that regularly participate in championships and most often appear on the blue screens.
10. Ural
The list of the most popular football clubs in Russia opens with one of the "patriarchs", whose yellow-black colors have appeared on the football field for more than 80 years. Ural fans are conservative people and try not to change their preferences. Indeed, for a true fan, cheating on his football team is worse than cheating on his beloved woman. So they continue to watch Ural's matches in the Premier League, hoping for a miracle.
However, in the past few years, things have been going on for Ural, and the club may be eliminated from the standings of the Russian Championship 2018 - 2019.
9. Anji
Anji fans are unhappy - according to the results of the Russian football championship, Makhachkala residents are in danger of being knocked out of the tournament. The club is also experiencing financial difficulties, since Suleiman Kerimov, who has been paying for Anji for a long time, chose to step aside.
The club cannot hire new players - the RFU chamber has banned Anji from buying new players until the old ones are paid. And the fans, although they swear at the team's poor results in the current championship, continue to look and believe in the best.
8. Ruby
Now the Kazan club is sixth in the Russian Premier League, but the path to the European league is closed to him. By the decision of the UEFA Investigative Chamber, it was decided to exclude Rubin from the standings for violating the rules of fair play.
Rubin's position is not brilliant - due to the scarcity of funding, it continues to lose players. At the beginning of March, five people had already left the "dragons", and the club's management is going to cut their salaries for the rest. How this will affect the popularity of the club - time will tell.
7. Rostov
Many football teams post clips from their "test matches" on YouTube, earning popularity with fans, but not "Rostov". The harsh Rostovites prefer to keep their strategic and tactical developments secret.
At the moment, Rostov is in sixth place in terms of total points in the Russian Championship.
6. Dynamo
Alas, for many years things have not been going brilliantly for the “blue and white”, but the fans are a loyal audience. Moreover, the history of victories at Dynamo is impressive: it is practically the only club before perestroika that took part in all the national championships and won a huge number of titles. It was for Moscow "Dynamo" that he once played best goalkeeper of all time - Lev Yashin.
But since the mid-90s, Dynamo's luck changed, and the blue-blues won their last victory (the Russian Cup) in 1995, and just ten years later they dropped out of the Premier League. How long will the fans bask in the light of the extinct star and how many will remain in another ten years?
5. Krasnodar
Although Krasnodar is one of the newcomers among Russian football clubs (it began its existence only 11 years ago), the fans love and appreciate it. Especially after the new team managed to win the Russian Cup in 2013 - 2014.
Before the winter break, Krasnodar followed closely behind the current leader, Zenit, just one point behind. However, then a series of failures began: Krasnodar not only flew out of the Europa League, losing to Valencia, but also lost 11 matches in a row.
However, the bulls are not discouraged, because, as the president of the club said, the main thing for them is an effective game, not a result. At the moment, Krasnodar is playing head-to-head with Lokomotiv in the standings of the Russian championship, taking fourth place.
4. Locomotive
The top four leading sports clubs in Russia in terms of popularity in 2019 will be opened by Lokomotiv. His matches, like Spartak, Zenit and CSKA, are usually watched by about 5 million spectators across the country.
And after last year's leadership of Lokomotiv in the Russian championship, when the club, despite the loss of several high-class players, managed to win the first place for the third time, its audience increased by several percent.
3. CSKA
It is paradoxical that the age composition of the fans of CSKA - one of the oldest football clubs in the country, leading its pedigree from pre-revolutionary Russia - is the youngest. Most often, the matches of this team are watched by boys under 25 years old, and according to polls, in this age segment, CSKA's popularity even surpasses the first place in the rating. The reason, perhaps, is that the childhood of the main audience fell on the "golden" era of the club, when the "army" in the early 2000s won victory after victory. Added to this is the change in the direction of the club's development: since last year, its management has set a course for the younger generation, inviting many young players to the team.
As for world fame, the picture is less favorable. In early 2019, the Spanish agency Deportes & Finanzaz analyzed the number of comments, links and reviews on football clubs' Twitter pages and compiled a list of the clubs most popular with fans. In the rating of 100 teams (where, in addition to CSKA, only one more Russian team entered), the club took 73rd place.
2. Zenith
Although football clubs in Russia are funded by the state, it prefers to keep its subjects on a meager ration. Therefore, leading Russian clubs are beginning to look at their Western colleagues and try to learn from their experience. Zenit was one of the first (together with Spartak and Lokomotiv) to work directly with fans through social networks popular with Russian users.
Perhaps it was thanks to this that Zenit managed to increase the number of its viewers by one and a half times - from 1.1 million to 1.6 million people. And in the world rating from Deportes & Finanzaz, Zenit is in 44th place, overtaking CSKA by 29 positions.
There are no more Russian teams in the ranking. And the results of the current Russian Football Championship in 2019 only confirm Zenit's superiority in the Spanish ranking. So far, he is in the lead in the standings, exceeding the result of CSKA by 5 points.
By the way, at one time in the Zenit national team there was a football player with the hardest hit in the history of football.
1. Spartacus
The first place in the number of loyal fans, and therefore in popularity among Russian football clubs, is occupied by the famous "Spartak". This is the most titled of the domestic clubs.
Every fifth spectator of the Russian Premier League watches matches with Spartak. However, if we compare the current popularity with the number of Russian football fans at the beginning of this century, the picture is more sad. Then the Premier League matches were watched by one and a half times more spectators, and the number of Spartak fans exceeded 2.5 million people.Now there are half a million less of them.
Nonetheless, Spartak remains the leading football club in popularity in Russia. It even shows the number of views of training matches on YouTube. There, the audience for a single sparring match from Spartak is practically equal to the total number of people who watched records from other clubs in the Premier League. This is despite the fact that the results of the current Russian Football Championship for Spartak are disappointing - in terms of the total number of points, it ranks fifth.