Elvir Rahimić, a renowned PFC CSKA player and coach, will hold training sessions for Tobolsk’s athletes

10 july 2022

On July 11, 2022, Elvir Rahimić, the famous Bosnian footballer and CSKA manager, is scheduled to pay a visit to the Children’s Olympic Republic. As part of his visit, he will interact with Tobolsk’s athletes and discuss his soccer career while also sharing his professional experience with the budding players’ coaches and offering a number of soccer master classes to the fledgling athletes. The celebrated coach will give several training sessions for the young players to help jumpstart their athletic careers.

For a whole week now, the Children’s Olympic Republic facility has been a venue for a sports camp that hosts 65 novice football players from Tobolsk’s Children's and Youths’ Sports School No. 2, as well as their coaches. The sports camp is the second stage of the Football Formula project which laid the foundation for a joint partnership program run by SIBUR and PFC CSKA with the intent of advancing children's and youths’ football in Tobolsk.

In 2022, SIBUR and CSKA provided a further boost to the advancement of children's and youths’ football in Tobolsk. Two crucial milestones have already been reached. This includes providing our support for the young players and their participation in various athletic tournaments, and holding school-level citywide tournaments between teams of first-, second- and third-grade students. Which has brought us to the next important phase: we are now in the process of fine-tuning the format of the collaboration between the Tobolsk Children's and Youths’ Sports School and PFC CSKA for the years to come. We hope that what we are doing right now using the model of a sports camp will enable our coaching staff to acquire new competencies and learn new methodologies to further advance the level of athletic development of our region’s children, Elena Belskaya, Head of ZapSibNeftekhim LLC’s Department of Government Relations and Social and Economic Projects, noted.

For the entire duration of the sports camp session that is scheduled to run for two full weeks, two more CSKA coaches, Artur Belotserkovets and Alexey Safronenko, will be attached to the young athletes on a full-time basis. They will be monitoring the players’ training on a day-to-day basis, while also conducting training sessions of their own and sharing their best practices with local coaches from Tobolsk.

The children have been conditioned quite well. And I am pleased to note that they are very eager to learn. At the beginning, we didn't know what to expect in terms of the level of fitness and readiness Tobolsk’s young players would have and whether or not they would be able to handle the workload. Some of them pleasantly surprised us with their high level of skill. However, we don`t have the whole picture yet, so it`s too early to give our final verdict. The playing days are going to tell us a lot, Artur Belotserkovets commented.

The budding footballers have been training under the guidance of the famous football club’s coaches with great zeal. In the course of their training sessions, the players are being shown new game tactics with a lot of attention being paid to developing proper ball handling techniques, strengthening team discipline, and intra-team communication. To help consolidate the material learned by the trainees during their training sessions, every fourth training day is dedicated to playing friendly games.

As we aren’t always able to do every exercise properly on the first try, sometimes it takes patience and persistence. You can see that the players are really eager to absorb the new material. Some are able to do it a little faster than the others, others need a little bit more time, but, overall, everyone gets there sooner or later. We will be sure to use these newly learned methods and techniques when we get back to our home base, Denis Mokrov, coach of Tobolsk’s Children's and Youths’ Sports School No. 2, noted.

Overall, the kids’ schedule at the sports camp is a quite packed. It consists of daily training sessions, visits to the physiotherapy room, and swimming in the pool. At their spare time the budding athletes are enjoying such activities as laser tag shooting, rock climbing at an indoor climbing facility, rowing, and various master classes including artistic molding.

I have really enjoyed training under Alexey Safronenko. Our classes are packed with some hard-to-do exercises. He’s been teaching us various spins and feints, how to kick the ball properly to ensure you hit the target, playing one-on-one and two-on-two. I also learned that in football you do not only need to be quick and have stamina, you also need to be able to think quickly on your feet to make quick decisions, Savely Grigorenko, a third-grade student from Tobolsk’s School No. 9 and an FC Tobol player, shared.

The children's sports camp at the Children’s Olympic Republic facility will be open from July 1 to 14, 2022.

For reference:

PFC CSKA is one of Russia’s oldest football clubs. It was founded in 1911 and is currently one of the top three most popular football brands in the country (according to VTSIOM, a polling organization). In 2005, PFC CSKA became the very first Russian club to win the European UEFA Cup. Its win of the Russia Cup in 2009 made it the nation’s number one football club in terms of the number of titles won. In May 2014, having celebrated its fifth championship title in the post-Soviet history, PFC CSKA was bestowed upon with a unique honor of being appointed the permanent keeper and custodian of all major domestic football trophies. The club is a 6-time champion of Russia, 7-time winner of the Russian Cup, 7-time winner of Russia’s Super Cup, the winner of the 2005 UEFA Cup. In 2022, SIBUR entered into a partnership with the club with the aim of developing and promoting children’s and youths’ football in the city that is widely viewed as the spiritual capital of Siberia.

Elvir Rahimić is a famous Bosnian soccer player and coach. He joined CSKA Moscow as a player in the summer of 2001. In 2013 he was appointed as a player-coach at CSKA Moscow. Since 2019, he has acted as the head coach of CSKA’s junior team made up of players born in 2002.

He was the first non-Russian player to play 250 games in Russia’s premier league. Overall, he made 347 career appearances on the pitch. Rahimić is a 5-time champion of Russia, 7-time winner of Russia’s Cup, 5-time winner of Russia’s Super Cup, and a winner of the UEFA Cup. He used to play for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s national team earning a total of 40 caps.