One thing is England, Germany, Italy with Spain and France, with regard to which everything is clear and understandable: football is very well developed there, and playing for teams in these countries is useful and honorable. But how can one explain the strange urge to find oneself somewhere in Luxembourg, Albania, Libya, Jordan, or Vietnam?
Since the late 1980s, when the mass departure of our footballers abroad in search of a better life began, fate has cast them into the most exotic places: from Australia to Canada, from Mozambique to the Faroe Islands. Needless to say, Ukrainian Nikolai Shevchenko managed to find work on the Maldives!
Former goalkeeper of the Moscow clubs Spartak and Dynamo Valery Derbunov first ended up in Mexico (in 1989, the Dynamo Kiev player Vadim Yevtushenko was also offered to go there), and then moved to Hong Kong, where he changed five clubs.
In Brazil, Yuri Shishkin from Samara played, while former Dynamo Kiev, Odessa Chernomorets, and Baku Neftchi forward Vitaly Shevchenko worked extensively as a coach in Colombia and, in recent years, has been managing Russian clubs.
Igor Shkvyryn, known for playing for Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, played in India for several years, and Vladimir Tatarchuk (from Volyn Oblast) and Andrei Kanchelskis (from Kirovograd), both products of Ukrainian football, spent some time in the Saudi Arabian championship. Kanchelskis, who is now trying to establish himself at Moscow Dynamo, even won that country's cup.
Ex-Spartak Moscow forward Azamat Abduraimov is the record holder for the number of Asian countries in which he played. Besides Saudi Arabia, these are Bangladesh, Malaysia, and India. The first Russians to become champions of an Asian country were the Torpedo players Alexei Arefyev, Sergei Zhukov, Alexander Dozmorov, and Alexander Polynkov, who won Bangladeshi "gold" in 1992 as part of Abahani.
The greatest success, however, was achieved by Gennady Stepushkin and Valery Sarychev, who, together with the Korean Ilhwa, won the Asian Champions Cup. Anzor Nafash, a Russian unknown to a wide circle of specialists, having moved to Jordan, reached the level of that country's national team, for which he plays regularly.
And a year ago, a whole group of Kharkiv footballers, led by Viktor Ivanenko and Ruslan Podust, who had played in the top league of the Ukrainian championship for Metalist, went to Vietnam, where the once-famous Lokomotiv forward Valentin Bubukin had left his coaching mark in his day. So the number of enthusiasts of football exotica is not decreasing.