Zarya has entered: the team from Lugansk will play in the Second League

The Russian Football Championship is once again being replenished with a team from new regions of the country. The other day, Lugansk Zarya passed the appropriate certification and, following Donetsk Shakhtar, was allowed to participate in Division B of the Second League of the national championship. Earlier, starting in 2023, FC Sevastopol and Rubin Yalta began playing in the fourth strongest division of Russian football. Izvestia talked with the president of Zarya and learned about the immediate plans and tasks of the team from the LPR.

Where will Zarya play?

Due to security issues, Zarya will play its home matches in the Rostov region, at the Abramovka Farm stadium. As the president of the Lugansk club, Araik Asatryan, explained to Izvestia, the local stadium, where the team previously played in the regional championship, received a corresponding certificate from the National Football League (FNL).

— The team will train in Lugansk, and go to Abramovka for the matches themselves — there is a maximum of one and a half to two hours by bus, - said the head of Zarya. — This is the closest possible option to Lugansk. There is also a stadium in Taganrog, but Shakhtar will play there. Going to Rostov-on-Don would also not be the best solution. Firstly, it's far away, and secondly, serious work is underway on the roads there, hence the traffic jams, which would create inconvenience for our fans.

At the same time, Lugansk has enough conditions for training and accommodation for the team. The club claims that the material and technical base there is at a fairly decent level.

"We have our own base here, our own training field, and we have all the infrastructure here," Asatryan stressed. — There are both artificial fields and natural ones. Lugansk has everything to train a team.

The composition of the team

According to the president of Zarya, the club had no difficult problems with passing the certification in the relevant FNL commission. The league quickly accepted all the documents and checked the organization from Lugansk for compliance with the requirements for finances, infrastructure and other standards that must be adhered to in order to obtain permission to play at this level.

— We have a fairly qualified team of specialists at the club, which has studied all the requirements of the FNL in advance, — said Asatryan. — Therefore, there was nothing difficult — everything went in working mode. There were some moments related to the fact that this was the first time they had undergone this procedure. Next year, I think we'll do it even better. The only significant difference compared to the previous competitions in which we participated was that we did not encounter an accounting audit performed by a specially engaged company. It took a while for us to find a company, and that was the most difficult moment. For the rest, we have been slowly preparing for the submission of documents throughout 2025, studying the FNL regulations.

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Zarya, in its current form, was registered as a football club at the end of 2023. In the next two seasons, she competed in the Commonwealth League (a tournament for teams from the DPR, LPR, Republic of Crimea, Sevastopol, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions) and the Rostov Region championship.

At the same time, the club consists mainly of local football players. According to the management, he has a sufficient budget to compete in Division B of the Second League, but the president of the organization did not name specific figures, noting that there are a number of sponsorship agreements that allow stable maintenance of the team.

"The budget will correspond to the average teams of the Second League," Asatryan explained to Izvestia. — We don't have any goals for the season to take the first place at any cost. In the future, we expect to compete for leadership, but this does not mean that we will spend a lot of money for this. My task is to educate local kids who haven't seen professional football in 10-12 years. We have 18 local players out of 23, from the LPR. We've been specifically targeting this.

According to him, when the club was first created, it consisted of 70% of visiting players and 30% of locals. Now the situation is almost reversed.

— We also brought back those Lugansk guys who played in Russia, for example, Ruslan Wojciechowski and Artyom Scholar from Saturn Ramenskoye. Now, if the goal is to win at any cost, we need to invite experienced players from other clubs and regions. And I don't want that. Our average age of the team is 20 years. I want them to play in the Second League for a year or two and get stronger. Then it will be possible to set higher tournament goals with their help," Asatryan said.

Football prospects in Luhansk

Luhansk has had an Avangard stadium with a capacity of over 22,000 spectators since Soviet times. Zarya played its home matches there until the summer of 2014, including in 1972, when it won the USSR Championship.

"It's in good condition now, so I think it will be ready to host high—level matches when Lugansk is able to host such sporting events in terms of security," asserts Asatryan. — The field at Avangard is in good condition. The stadium is ready for the Second League. It is clear that if you take a higher level, Division A or the First League, then a lot more needs to be done and improved. But it's a good stadium for Division B.

Children's and youth football is being intensively developed in the LPR. For example, 90 teams participate in the republic's mini-football championship. There are 8-on-8 soccer leagues.

— Football lives here, everyone plays here and a lot, — said the president of Zarya. — We have opened a football school, where we are recruiting children born in 2015-2016 and we will continue to recruit more. A lot of children go to the Commonwealth tournament. There are U-13, U-15, U-17 teams there. The Lugansky Sports International is also developing. Children in the LPR are very willing to play football. That's why we want our students to be mostly at Zara. That's why we created the second Zarya-2 team (which will play in the Rostov Region championship), where our young football players will be.

Zarya will compete in Group 1 of Division B. Teams from the North Caucasus and the Southern Federal District also play in this group. The tournament is scheduled to start in the second half of March.