The Moscow Spartak club has announced the revival of its secondary squad, a decision confirmed by the club’s official channels. The second red-and-white team is returning after a two-year hiatus, with plans to enter participation in the Second League of Russian football. This move is described by Spartak’s leadership as a strategic step to better organize the club’s vertical structure and to offer an additional pathway for academy students and youth players as they transition into senior football. The Spartak-2 project, first launched in 2013, has historically given young talents valuable match experience and has helped the core players recover form after injuries by providing dedicated training alongside the A team.
Spartak’s farm teams have a long history dating back to Soviet times, even before the Second World War. In those early days there were two such squads. Spartak II reached the finals among fitness-club teams (KFC) in the RSFSR Cup and participated in the USSR Cup in 1937, 1938 and 1939. The other farm squad, Spartak-Club, became Moscow champions in 1960, claimed the USSR Cup among KFC teams a year earlier, and captured the Moscow Cup in 1956, 1957 and 1959. These early days established a tradition of parallel development paths alongside the main club. The contemporary era later saw the duo team perform under the banner Spartak-D and, since 1998, as Spartak-2. Between 2001 and 2008, the side competed in the second and third divisions of the PFL and took part in the LFL championship as an amateur junior team. The official return of Spartak-2 to professional status occurred in May 2013, when the squad featured several promising youngsters under the leadership of former Moscow footballer Evgeniy Bushmanov. The club eventually decided to disband the second team following the 2021/22 season, after a seventh-place finish in the FNL. The rationale behind the decision was the overall performance of the team in that period, which prompted reassessment of the squad’s role within Spartak’s broader ambitions.
Bushmanov has expressed a clear view that Spartak needs a second team to support its long-term growth. He sees the revival as a logical step, highlighting that Spartak’s academy sits among the best in the country and produces a steady stream of graduates each year. The second team would serve as a bridge for young players making the turn to adult football, offering a structured environment to refine skills and gain essential competitive experience. The goal is to create a continuous pipeline from the academy to the A team, reducing the gap between youth development and top-level competition. In his assessment, the absence of a second team over the prior years has made it harder for emerging players to transition smoothly, with a few players previously able to demonstrate their potential within the A team each season. There were still names circulating within the system, such as Pavel Meleshin, a striker recognized by many and Daniil Zorin, who has played for Dynamo Minsk, but overall progress from the academy to the main squad was not as consistent as hoped.
Not everyone views the plan with unanimity. Valery Gladilin, a former Moscow football figure and coach, voiced skepticism about the second team’s utility. He suggested that the project has not resonated globally as a proven model and questioned its value for Spartak in the current football landscape. Gladilin argued that the work of the technical staff and the new management would shift toward attracting foreign specialists, implying that a second team might not deliver the intended benefits. He noted that historically the second team often prepared players for other clubs rather than contributing significant numbers to the base team, with only rare exceptions making the leap to the main squad. If the second team exists primarily to give academy graduates internships and potential roles within Spartak, that would be a positive outcome, but if it becomes a vehicle for bringing in foreign players into key positions, its effectiveness would be limited. Gladilin contrasted this with European models where clubs like Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich maintain strong internal schools that feed the senior squads. He observed that even in top clubs with strong youth systems, many talented players move on to other teams before breaking into the first team, underscoring a common fate in modern football where only a small fraction reach the pinnacle. This perspective highlights the tension between nurturing homegrown talent and the pressures of competing in a global market for players.