Jordan Ladder: who will Russia play the next match against

The Russian national football team begins a series of autumn friendly matches. On Thursday, Valery Karpin's team will host the Jordanian team in Moscow, one of the strongest in the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in recent years.

Back in early August, the Russian Football Union (RFU) managed to reach an agreement with its rivals for all six games that could be scheduled in the fall. Moreover, only Sunday's meeting with Qatar will be an away game for us. The rest will be held in Russia. So, we will meet with Jordan in the capital at the Lukoil Arena in Tushino, the home stadium of Spartak Moscow.

Historical successes

On October 10, a confrontation with Iran awaits us in Volgograd. Four days later, Bolivia will come to visit us, and the match with it will take place in Moscow at the VTB Arena, Dynamo's home stadium. Russia will play Peru in St. Petersburg on November 12, and Chile in Sochi three days later.

— It is good that in the current conditions of suspension from international competitions, it is possible to negotiate with rivals of a good level, — Vyacheslav Koloskov, honorary president of the RFU, told Izvestia. — And then we also managed to expand the geography for the fall, having massively agreed on games with representatives of South America, with whom we last met before the sanctions. In any case, it will be a plus for the future, when you have to return to official tournaments. And this is good not only in terms of testing their strength, but also being in a high place in the FIFA rankings, where Russia is in 35th place, having not lost much in three and a half years outside the official starts. This also arose due to numerous friendly matches and victories in them.

Apart from Bolivia, which is 78th in the FIFA ranking, Jordan, which occupies 64th place, is the least high-profile of all the national teams listed above, with which our national team is planning friendly meetings. Nevertheless, the team from the Middle East should not be underestimated.

In recent years, the kingdom's national team has significantly improved its results. She has participated in Asian Cup qualifying competitions since the early 1970s. It was only in 2004 that she made it to the final of the continental tournament, where she immediately got out of the group and reached the quarterfinals. After that, she stopped qualifying again. However, Jordan has been a stable participant in the championship since the last decade.

She has been in the finals of all the last four Asian Cups. In 2011, she managed to reach the quarterfinals again, in 2015 she failed to get out of the group, and in 2019 she managed to reach the 1/8 finals. And in January 2024, Jordan sensationally reached the finals, beating Iraq (3:2), Tajikistan (1:0) and South Korea, which seemed to be one of the favorites (2:0) in the playoffs.

Only in the decisive match, the Jordanians were stopped by the hosts of the competition, the Qatar national team (3:1). A year and a half later, Jordan built on its success by making it to the World Cup finals for the first time in history. Now, next summer, she will travel to the main tournament of the planet, which will be held in the USA, Canada and Mexico.

The main star

Jordan's squad is quite modest in terms of names. Most of her players play either in the championship of their native country or in the neighboring leagues of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. There are also football players from clubs in Malaysia and South Korea. But the main star is 28-year-old midfielder Musa Suliman Al-Tamari.

He has been playing in Europe since 2018. At first it was the championships of Cyprus and Belgium. But in 2023, Al-Tamari became the first football player in the history of Jordan to sign a professional contract with a club from the top 5 national championships in Europe. It was the French Montpellier, where over the next year and a half he played 47 matches in Ligue 1 (the highest division) of the local championship. At the beginning of 2025, he moved to Rennes, where, as in the previous club, he regularly plays in the main squad for French championship matches.

"Teams like Jordan are pretty well trained," Boris Ignatiev, the former head coach of the Russian national team and the Iraqi Olympic team, shared his opinion with Izvestia. — Almost all the teams from the Middle East have improved in recent decades. Therefore, it is not surprising that Jordan reached the World Cup for the first time and reached the Asian Cup finals for the first time. Usually, these teams have few players competing in strong national championships, mostly they cook in their own juice, but due to the discipline and organization of the game, they are able to cause problems to any opponent in individual meetings. Remember the last World Cup in Qatar, when Saudi Arabia beat Argentina (1-0), the future winner of the tournament. On the other hand, these national teams rarely produce high-level football consistently. So it cannot be said that Russia has received a strong rival, against which it is possible to thoroughly understand its level. But the current situation forces us to be content with what we have. In any case, it's better than Brunei and Grenada, which we had to play against in previous national team windows.

Russia's match against Jordan will begin on September 4 at 20:00.