Turning to Livo: the transfer of the top scorer and the scandalous exchange

Details of Nikolai Goldobin's transfer from Spartak to SKA, the signing of Joshua Livo to Traktor and his scandalous departure from Salavat, the unexpected transfer of Vladimir Tkachev to Metallurg and the continuation of the recruitment of Shanghai Dragons. Read more about the main deals in the KHL in the Izvestia article.

Joshua Livo (from Salavat Yulaev to Traktor)

The first news that Salavat Yulaev will enter the new season without its best sniper appeared back in the spring. At that time, Business Online reported that XU would terminate the contract with Joshua Livo, but the club promptly denied this information.

For a long time, clouds of financial problems were gathering over Salavat. Constant news about courts with counterparties due to debts, as well as a complete lull in the transfer market, hinted that a contract with Livo could become unaffordable for the club.

Having failed to find options for an exchange, Ufa used a trick: they terminated the agreement with the striker due to the fact that he did not arrive on time for the start of the team's training camp. So, "Salavat", according to "Sport-Express", managed to save about 30 million rubles, which would have been due to Livo as compensation if the contract was terminated at the initiative of the club.

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But the Canadian himself did not remain without a team for long. According to the Livo agent, representatives of Traktor and Ak Bars immediately contacted him. The 32-year-old player chose Chelyabinsk. But even here it wasn't that simple: at that time, Traktor had recruited the maximum possible number of legionnaires, so it was urgently necessary to get rid of someone.

32-year-old defender Mike Vecchione, who was signed two weeks earlier, went to the exit — he managed to get a job at Barys.

Livo also received a contract for 70 million rubles a year and became the seventh player of the Chelyabinsk club to sign an agreement for this amount. According to SE, the Canadian can get the same amount if he gets into the top three scorers at the end of the season. That is, it has every chance to earn more than in Ufa.

Nikolay Goldobin (from Spartak to SKA)

The epic with Nikolai Goldobin also dragged on for months. Rumors that the Spartak leadership was unhappy with him began to appear during the last season — it got to the point that the best sniper of the red-whites remained out of the application for some matches.

During the offseason, news periodically appeared that a forward exchange was being prepared. However, everything was cut short due to the overly high demands of the Spartak leadership. Goldobin's agent accused the Red-Whites of disrespecting the player.

— The Spartak management does not terminate the contract with the player, but tries to get benefits for the team, but it's better to ask them what it is, — said Sergey Isakov in an interview with Match TV.

But what the agent wanted happened in the end. Suddenly, Spartak put Goldobin on waivers in mid-August. The procedure is simple: any club can apply for signing a player within 48 hours. If there are several such clubs, then the priority remains for the team with the worst result at the end of last season.

So, rumors immediately appeared that Goldobin would be taken over by Barys. And that was the logic: almost all the top clubs had no room left under the salary cap, and the rest were unlikely to be able to extend the player's contract, even though most of them were buried in bonuses.

The slender structure of the forward's move to Kazakhstan was destroyed by SKA: St. Petersburg became the only club that applied for Goldobin. At the same time, St. Petersburg even thanked Spartak for such a gift, giving Grigory Kuzmin and Arseny Ilyin, as well as the rights to Maxim Groshev and Ruslan Khazheev, who performed in North America, and monetary compensation. Although this is not provided for by the regulations.

Vladimir Tkachev (from Avangard to Metallurg)

Tkachev's departure from the Omsk club was also indecently long in coming, but it was formalized at the end of July. The year before, the striker had signed a five-year contract with the club with a salary of 120 million per season, but he had never received the full amount. In the first year, Tkachev went down to 80 million a year because he suffered an Achilles injury while preparing for the season. And then it all ended in termination.

Despite the length of the agreement, Omsk paid the player only 25% of the contract for the coming season (30 million rubles).

Vladimir Tkachev found a new club very quickly — Metallurg Magnitogorsk became it. According to Traktor's general manager, the Chelyabinsk club was also actively negotiating the signing of the player.

— Metallurg's offer outweighed ours. He chose the team based on the concept of the game. Apparently, Andrey Razin seemed more suitable to Tkachev as the head coach," Sport24 quotes Alexey Volkov.

According to SE, the forward will definitely receive 65 million rubles in Magnitogorsk in the coming year. His contract also provides bonuses of up to 100 million rubles for getting into the top three of the league in various indicators. If we add to this the 30 million rubles received from Omsk, it turns out to be very solid.

Shanghai Dragons

The Shanghai-based club launched an official player signing campaign just last weekend, before that, the management was busy moving from the Moscow Region to St. Petersburg and rebranding.

SMM Dragons solved the problem of announcing the entire squad in a short time quite creatively: the club began to introduce players in fives.

It is already clear that Patrick Rybar (who was withdrawn from the draft last season) and Andrey Kareev (who was left without a club due to the disbandment of Vityaz) will play in the gates of the Dragons. By the way, in addition to Kareev, striker Ivan Chekhovich and defender Vladislav Valentsov also moved from Vityaz.

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The club does not have to meet the limit on foreign players, so a decent number of foreigners are going to St. Petersburg — almost all from the AHL.

The most prominent of the foreign players have already played in the KHL. Among them are Ryan Spooner, who scored 60+ points in the regular season for Avangard, and Nick Merkley, who scored 40 points for Dinamo Minsk.

Among the unexpected signings is Alexander Burmistrov. Last season, the Russian found a club only by the end of the deadline, so he played only eight matches for Dynamo, without making a single effective action. Now the 33-year-old center forward will get another chance to prove his worth in the KHL.