SKA Khabarovsk earned historic promotion to the top-flight after a dramatic play-off win on penalties over Orenburg but they were immediately billed as favourites for relegation at the start of the season. Aleksey Podubskii managed to bring some experienced players at this level to bolster the squad but the feeling was that there was just too little quality to work it and their major disadvantage was the huge distance that they had to travel for every away game. On the other hand, SKA looked quite solid at home at the start of the season and after losing to Zenit in the opener, went on a good run of form in front of their fans. Yet the results on the road were predictably dismal, earning a single point on the road in the ten games played away from home in the first half of the season.
SKA were mostly focusing on defence, using five at the back, and hoping to feed off scraps on the counter to get some goals. Yet after the initially promising results, the team went into a downward spiral from October onwards and soon started to get cut adrift at the bottom. Indeed, a run of six losses in a row in November and December left them very much looking like domed for relegation ahead of the long winter break. There was a change of manager and lots of new faces coming in during the close season but little changed on the pitch as SKA remained utterly and completely devoid of attacking potency and creativity. Experienced coach Rinat Bilyaletdinov lasted barely four games in the spring before resigning and Sergey Perednya was the one who completed the campaign.
SKA broke all sorts of negative records in the remainder of the season. going ten games without scoring a single goal in 2018 and losing eight home games in a row. They actually earned just a single point in 2018 as well and finished with just 13 points from 30 games. The squad will be better for the experience of this season but they were badly shown up to be out of their depth at this level.
