Fyodor Cherenkov
Personal information | |||||||||||||||||
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Full name | Fyodor Fyodorovich Cherenkov | ||||||||||||||||
Date of birth | 25 July 1959 | ||||||||||||||||
Place of birth | Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union | ||||||||||||||||
Date of death | 4 October 2014 | (aged 55)||||||||||||||||
Place of death | Moscow, Russia | ||||||||||||||||
Height | 1.78 m (5 ft 10 in) | ||||||||||||||||
Position(s) | Midfielder | ||||||||||||||||
Youth career | |||||||||||||||||
1969–1971 | Kuntsevo Moscow | ||||||||||||||||
1971–1977 | Spartak Moscow | ||||||||||||||||
Senior career* | |||||||||||||||||
Years | Team | Apps | (Gls) | ||||||||||||||
1977–1990 | Spartak Moscow | 344 | (86) | ||||||||||||||
1990–1991 | Red Star Saint-Ouen | 15 | (1) | ||||||||||||||
1991–1993 | Spartak Moscow | 54 | (9) | ||||||||||||||
Total | 413 | (96) | |||||||||||||||
International career | |||||||||||||||||
1979–1990 | Soviet Union | 34 | (12) | ||||||||||||||
1980–1983 | Soviet Union Olympic | 10 | (6) | ||||||||||||||
Managerial career | |||||||||||||||||
1994–1995 | Spartak Moscow (assistant) | ||||||||||||||||
1996–1997 | Spartak Moscow (reserves assistant) | ||||||||||||||||
2013–2014 | Spartak Moscow (youth assistant) | ||||||||||||||||
Medal record
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*Club domestic league appearances and goals |
Fyodor Fyodorovich Cherenkov (Russian: Фёдор Фёдорович Черенко́в; 25 July 1959 – 4 October 2014) was a Soviet and Russian football midfielder who played for Spartak Moscow (1977–90 and 1991–94) and Red Star Football Club (1990–91).
Playing career
Cherenkov made 34 appearances for the Soviet Union national team, scoring 12 goals. Although widely regarded by Spartak's fans as the 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 (b. 1959) 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 (goal plus pass) in the team's history.
Life and personality
A 2021 profile on BBC Sport relates that Cherenkov was a kind and approachable "regular guy" who could not understand his own fame. He suffered several attacks of an unknown mental illness during his playing career, and missed important games because of it, but was "widely seen as the best Soviet footballer of the decade". His daughter Anastasia was born in 1980. He died in 2014, at age 55, after collapsing outside his home. An autopsy at a Moscow hospital found a brain tumour. The profile described him as a "football genius".
Honours
- 1979, 1987, 1989 – Soviet Top League
- 1993 – Russian Premier League
- 1994 – Russian Cup
- 1983, 1989 – Soviet Footballer of the Year
- 1989 - Club Loyalty Award
- 1980 - Olympics bronze medal
- 1959 births
- 2014 deaths
- Moscow State Mining University alumni
- Men's association football midfielders
- Soviet men's footballers
- Russian men's footballers
- Footballers from Moscow
- Russian football managers
- FC Spartak Moscow players
- Red Star F.C. players
- Olympic footballers for the Soviet Union
- Olympic bronze medalists for the Soviet Union
- Footballers at the 1980 Summer Olympics
- Soviet Union men's international footballers
- Soviet expatriate men's footballers
- Expatriate men's footballers in France
- Soviet expatriate sportspeople in France
- Soviet Top League players
- Ligue 2 players
- Russian Premier League players
- Olympic medalists in football
- Medalists at the 1980 Summer Olympics
- Deaths from brain cancer in Russia
- Burials in Troyekurovskoye Cemetery