Antonin Fivebr (Spartak)

In 1936, a significant event took place in Soviet football - from May to July, the rally of the first USSR football championship among clubs took place, which replaced the championships with the participation of combined cities and republics. The new organization of the competition led to the restructuring of many teams, where the head coach position was first introduced. This happened in the Moscow “Spartak”, which was headed by the Czech specialist Antonin Fivebr.

Feivebr was born in Prague in 1888 and made a name for himself as a footballer in the local Sparta. At the end of his playing career, he ended up in the Italian "Brescia", where he began to master the art of coaching. When Feivebre moved to Spain in 1923, he already worked with local teams exclusively from the edge.

He left his mark on teams such as Elche, Oviedo, Levante and Valencia, which he managed to bring to Example. Interestingly, one of Antonin's main hobbies in Spain was the bullfight, and he even tried himself as a toreodor.

The unstable political situation in Spain in the 1930s prompted Feivebra to leave the country. Just at that moment, in 1935, he received an invitation from the All-Union Committee on Physical Culture and Sports to engage in the development of football in the USSR. The Czech specialist agreed. His responsibilities included advising teams across the country and transferring world football experience to the Soviet Union.

In 1936, Feivebr accepted the invitation to head “Spartak” at the USSR spring championship at the same time. The debut of the Czech coach was unsuccessful - the red and white ones were defeated by the CDKA with a score of 0: 3. But in the end, Spartak ended a short tournament with three wins, one draw and two defeats, which allowed it to take third place in the standings. At the same time, when Muscovites started at Feivebrae, they successfully started in the USSR Cup, having defeated the Dynamo Voronezh. By the percentage of victories won, the Czech is still the best legionnaire coach in the history of Spartak.

For a long time, Moscow did not begin to manage the club. He was expected in other parts of the USSR, and then he moved to the Leningrad Dynamo, worked briefly in Zaporozhye and Dnepropetrovsk, and returned to Moscow, where he headed the Stalinist for a short time. In 1938, Feivebr returned to his homeland and worked already in local teams, including the Trnava Spartak. Muscovites were headed by Mikhail Kozlov, who immediately led the red-and-white victory in the autumn championship of the USSR.

Pavel Butusov (Zenit)

The first head coach of Zenit Pavel Butusov represented one of the oldest football clans in the country. His older brother Vasily was the star of pre-revolutionary football and the captain of the national team at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, and the youngest, Mikhail, was twice recognized as the best player of the year in the USSR in his role. The other three brothers of Pavel Butusov also played football, but their successes were more modest.

Butusov was a promising striker of St. Petersburg Unitas, but the Civil War changed his life drastically. In 1918, he was in the small homeland of his parents in Myshkin. Upon learning that the Red Army needed volunteers, Pavel tried to enlist in its ranks, but the military commissariat appreciated his knowledge of sports and ordered him to organize a city gymnastics club. Butusov coped with the task and at the same time created the Gladiator football club, in which he continued his football career. The organizational skills shown then were very useful for the young athlete in the future.

In 1922, Butusov returned to Leningrad and continued to play with his brothers in the amateur “Pischevik” until 1928, when an injury forced him to finish sports. By that time, Butusov had learned to be an engineer-economist and was able to fully devote himself to work.

However, he himself as a representative of the famous football dynasty was not forgotten. In 1935, Butusov was invited by the Stalin Leningrad Metal Plant team, a direct predecessor of Zenit, in distress in the city championship. The plant management decided that it was better for the playing coach Boris Ivin to remain a player, and the team should be prepared by Butusov, who was not interested in football experience.

The first "professional", as they said then, the coach started off the bat. The LMZ team immediately reached the finals of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. In the final match against the Moscow Electrozavod, Leningraders missed the only ball in the last minute. By the way, the gate of the metropolitan team then defended the future FIFA vice president Valentin Granatkin.

The affairs of the LMZ also improved in the championship of Leningrad - once the "metalworkers" even issued a series of seven victories in a row. But the ending of the rally was not so successful, and Butusov's wards took fifth place. The players expressed no confidence in the coach, and he was fired. Pavel continued to engage in engineering, traveled around the country a lot, took part in the construction of the Zhigulevskaya hydroelectric station, and almost everywhere where fate brought him, he continued to develop football, but at an amateur level.

Pavel Halkiopov (CSKA)

The first mentor of CSKA Pavel Halkiopov was born in 1905 in Moscow. As a young man, he became interested in football and played for the club Sokolniki Circle of Skiers until it was liquidated and became part of the Vsevobuch Experimental and Demonstration Site, which was under the auspices of the Red Army. Halkiopov continued to play for the army in the championship of Moscow as a defender and in 1932 even became captain of the Central House of the Red Army - that was the name of the club at that time.

In 1934, Halkiopov finished playing, but didn’t leave the team and headed it as the head, and when in 1936 the CDKA became part of the participants of the first USSR championship, he became the head coach. In the spring tournament, the army team took fourth place, which could be attributed to the lack of experience for both the players and the coach. But the fall championship of the CDKA failed, finishing in the last, eighth line. In addition, in 1936, the army team left the USSR Cup already at the stage of the 1/16 finals, losing to the Dynamo Pyatigorsk. Khalkiopov’s work was recognized as unsatisfactory, and to this day he remains one of the worst coaches of CSKA in the percentage of matches won - he led the team to only five victories in 15 games.

But in the structure of the club, Halkiopov continued to pursue a career. He, a graduate of the Frunze Military Academy, in 1938 was appointed head of the department of physical education and sports of the Central House of the Soviet Army. Halkiopov also held leadership positions in the USSR Football Federation until his death in 1968, and for some time even served as chairman of the presidium of the All-Union Section of Hockey. Khalkiopov participated in the Great Patriotic War, was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

  • Pavel Halkiopov
  • © CSKA

Alexey Stolyarov (Lokomotiv)

The first head coach of Lokomotiv Alexei Stolyarov was born in the same year as Khalkiopov. He began his football career in his native St. Petersburg, where he first played for Merkur, and then moved to the strongest club in the city of Dynamo, where he began to be involved in games for the USSR national team. In 1928, Stolyarov went to conquer the capital and also turned out to be part of the blue and white. In 1932, he became the champion of the country as part of the Moscow team.

Stolyarov’s field was distinguished by intransigence and real rigidity, which was brought up in him by the classical (now called Greco-Roman) wrestling. Until now, in some sources, Stolyarov is called the winner of the All-Union Spartakiad in 1928 in this sport, although this is not so - that year he was recognized as the best left midfielder of the USSR, and Stolyarov's name does not appear among the champions of the tournament.

In 1935, Stolyarov ended up in Kazanka - the Kazan Railway team and the predecessor of Lokomotiv. The very next season, it was transformed into a full-fledged club with a modern name, which received the right to fight for medals of the first USSR championship. Although Kazanka had its own playing coach, the Frenchman Jules Limbeck, who came to take up football in a young country at the same time as Feivebrom, the leadership of the new Lokomotiv sports community entrusted Stolyarov with preparing the team for a responsible debut.

The first “driver” of “Locomotive” and sometimes went on the field, but basically still led the team from the edge, which turned out very well for him. From the fifth place in the spring tournament, the railroad climbed to fourth in the fall (losing only two points to the champion), but a real triumph awaited them in the first draw of the USSR Cup. Lokomotiv successively defeated Kungur and Kharkov Dynamo, Leningrad Spartak, Kharkov Sickle and Hammer, Leningrad Red Dawn, and defeated Dynamo Tbilisi in the final.

It is interesting that the railway workers did not immediately receive the trophy - initially they were obliged to replay the final, now with the Dynamo Moscow, which missed the tournament because of a tour of Czechoslovakia. But still this strange decision has not come into force.

Despite the unequivocal success in the coaching field, Stolyarov the next year handed over the post of mentor of Lokomotiv Limbek. The Zheleznodorozhniks no longer won titles until 1957, when they again won the USSR Cup. The further fate of Stolyarov after a short work as a coach is unknown. Various sources claim that he died in Moscow between 1940 and 1944.

Konstantin Kvashnin (Dynamo)

Since the appearance of Dynamo Moscow in 1923, the team had a post of coach, which was occupied by one of the most gifted players, which did not relieve him of the obligation to enter the field and confirm his leadership status. The first head coach in the modern sense was Konstantin Kvashnin. Like many of the colleagues already mentioned, he got his post right before the USSR debut championship in 1936.

Kvashnin was born in Moscow in 1899. From an early age he was interested in sports and tried almost all the disciplines that were popular among young people at the beginning of the 20th century - boxing, wrestling, weightlifting, skating and, of course, football. At the age of 15, Kvashnin began to be involved in the team of the Russian gymnastic society "Falcon" - the distant progenitor of "Spartak". The midfielder remained loyal to the team, which changed several names after the October Revolution, until in 1928 he ended up at Dynamo.

With white-blue Kvashnin was familiar firsthand, but this acquaintance was not the most successful. It was he, while still a player of Krasnaya Presnya, who was the judge in the first match of Dynamo with his club in 1923. At the end of the meeting, which was supposed to end in a draw, Kvashnin unexpectedly awarded a penalty at the gate of the departmental club, and so unjust that goalkeeper Fyodor Chulkov did not even try to repel the blow and left the field. It would seem that after this Kvashnin was ordered to go to Dynamo, but fate decreed otherwise.

However, Kvashnin did not have time to fully play in the new club. Almost immediately, he received a serious injury, which did not allow him to remain in the main team. He could still go on the field in matches of duplicate squads, but he began to devote the main time to the basics of the coaching profession, as well as hockey, in which he won the national championship three times. When by 1935 it became clear that clubs needed independent coaches instead of playing clubs for successful performances, Kvashnin took over as a mentor.

It was he who was destined to be the first to win the USSR championship among clubs as a coach. Dynamo Moscow phenomenally held a spring tournament, winning all six matches with a total score of 22: 5.

In the fall, they became silver medalists, losing just a point to Spartak. Soon Kvashnin was fired, but not because of this local failure. In those years, the coach had to reckon not only for the result of the team, but also for many other things, including accounting, and the football specialist did not follow it very carefully.

Kvashnin did not sit idle for a long time - he was immediately invited by Spartak, with whom he immediately won two and a half gold and silver medals of the USSR Championship, as well as the country's Cup. The coach also left his mark in the Moscow Torpedo, with which he also won the Cup in 1949. Although it was still necessary to search for such titled coaches in those years, Kvashnin three years later gave way to younger ones, and he himself went to work in the RSFSR Football Federation. For some time he was also the director of a sporting goods store in Moscow. Kvashnin lived a long life and died at the age of 83.