that’s why the legendary USSR football player and ex-coach of Spartak Fedotov died so early

Vladimir Fedotov – not the current coach of CSKA, but the legendary football player of the 1960-70s and the son of the great Grigory Fedotov – managed to do something amazing. He left the best possible memory of himself among the fans of two irreconcilable rivals – CSKA and Spartak. It is difficult to find another person like him in our football.

In the army team, Fedotov became the record holder for the number of matches played in the USSR Championship (382 matches, 92 goals). And it was his goal that brought the team the 1970 championship, won in the famous Tashkent replay with Dynamo.

At Spartak he was remembered as a coach. First he entered the headquarters of Oleg Romantsev, then he was twice. O. When the console was finally removed – this happened after the scandalous departure of Alexander Starkov – he returned nice football to Spartak, established contact with the youth, made the fans fall in love with him and brought the team to silver in 2006 (the same number of points with the lump of those years CSKA).

But the fairy tale, alas, did not last long. After a series of failures the following season, Grigoriich, as many in the football world called him, was replaced by Stanislav Cherchesov. That story broke him very much. Despite the fact that, unlike many other Spartak coaches, he left, retaining the love of the stands. And this is really an indicator.

“Spartak” turned out to be Fedotov’s penultimate place of work in big football. The last one was the Moscow football club. There he worked for a year and a half as sports director – from June 2007 to January 2009. And two months later Grigoryich was gone. He was only 66…

“My husband died of terrible depression—two months without work,” Fedotov’s widow, Lyubov Konstantinovna, told Soviet Sport. — He passed away like Oleg Dal, like Vladimir Vysotsky, like the young actor Galkin. Two months after leaving Moscow, I tried to persuade my husband to pull himself together. And he left this life purposefully. Gloomily, he went up to his office, drank, and the phone calls stopped… He was not happy with the new house. But a month before his death, the priest consecrated the house. In the morning I found him in the bedroom – on the floor next to the bed and called an ambulance. He died two weeks later without regaining consciousness.
The coach’s widow also told one more detail: “My husband was especially worried about how he was treated at Spartak.” If the president of the club, Leonid Fedun, had said: “Vladimir Grigorievich, we kindly ask you to stay at Spartak as a sports director”… Volodya would have stayed. But this position was not needed by the then new head coach of Spartak.

Fedotov, as he himself said, had an ulcer – therefore, for example, cognac was contraindicated for him. And another detail was shared by Grigoryich’s friend, the famous CSKA football player Vladimir Ponomarev. “When Volodka was removed from Spartak, he was worried, he started drinking, but he couldn’t – he had diabetes…” said Ponomarev.

As the finale of this story – the piercing words of Fedotov himself. And, alas, prophetic. Said shortly after leaving Spartak:

— It was the fans who approved me as the head coach of Spartak. Their support made such an impression on the shareholders that they had nowhere to go. I both forgave the management for their decision and regretted it. They envy me, poor fellows. You see, I have a place at the Novodevichy cemetery. These gentlemen will never be there. So they are jealous…