Football Season Guide

Lokomotiv Moscow were one of the better teams in the league last season and finished merely four points off the top spot at the end. That said, they were never really in the title race and it felt like they did not quite reach their full potential throughout the campaign. They now start the new season motivated to build on the last campaign and become a more effective and complete side as a whole as they try to topple Zenit off the top of the standings at long last. Yet, the fact that they lost their best player from last season in Maksim Glushenkov to the aforementioned Zenit for a pretty big sizeable sum shows the scale of the task that Mikhail Galaktionov is facing. At the moment, Loko just do not look ready to last the distance in a title race, having lost too much creativity and goals in Glushenkov, Anton Miranchuk, Artem Dzyuba and Rifat Zhemaletdinov. In terms of new additions, the Railwaymen have been quite constrained so far with Dmytry Vorobyev the main new signing. He is a good striker but hardly one that can catapult Loko into the contention. There is undoubtedly need for new additions in attacking midfield and maybe in defence but so far Loko are in holding pattern and are waiting for opportunities in the market. This makes is pretty hard to assess Galaktionov's men and how they will stack up with the likes of Dynamo, Krasnodar and Spartak as pretenders for Zenit's crown.