The Russian Lower Leagues

From Borodinsky to Zakamsk, one photographer's journey through the backwaters of the Russian game

By Sergei Novikov

1st December 2016

Sergey Novikov has spent much of the past four years travelling through Russia photographing amateur football. He works for culta.ru and Grassroots is a project he has funded himself in his spare time. "For me it's always interesting to look at what surrounds the stadium," he said in an interview with the Moscow Times. "How does it fit into the landscape? The stadiums in the Tver region are often surrounded by concrete blocks. In the village of Pryazha in the Karelia region, they built a wooden fence around the pitch as though it were a fortress."

Games Novikov has tried to photograph have often been called off at short notice, usually because teams lack the funding to travel. On one occasion he was asked to play after a player fell ill. He's been to two closed cities in Murmansk with minders to make sure the football was all he was photographing. In Crimea, he's been accused of being a spy. But he's kept going through the difficulties and hopes to produce a book from his project before the 2018 World Cup, documenting the remarkable variety of life outside Russia's biggest cities.