Soviet Top League
The Soviet Top League, known after 1970 as the Higher League, served as the top division of Soviet Union football championship from 1936 until 1991. Over the years, the league's name has changed several times. Created in 1936, the tier was originally known as "Gruppa A" and was one of four tiers that comprised the Soviet football championship.
It was owned and governed by the All-Union Committee of Physical Culture. The winner of the competition was honored with the title "USSR Champion" and awarded the All-Union Committee banner.
From its inception to its eclipse, the top tier operated in conjunction with the second tier for most of the time, allowing for participants to exchange between tiers through promotion and relegation. In 1963, a third tier was introduced. Starting from 1971, the full official name was the USSR Championship in football: Top League. An attempt to create an independent league as an autonomously governed business entity or organization during "perestroika" period was denied by the Federation due to the political culture in the Soviet Union.
Although the competition is considered professional, there were no professional sports in the Communist state due to its political stance on that issue. The teams that played in the league were composed of players who, officially, in fiscal books, were employed and paid by the state enterprises or agencies that the teams represented. Also, players from the state agencies' teams, SKA or Dynamo, held a rank, captain, lieutenant, major, etc. Also, the naming of teams was strictly controlled and had to be approved by the central government. Only after the death of Stalin, teams were allowed to have names associated with their geographic location, due to the Soviet political stance on the national issue. Also, officially, teams represented so-called "voluntary" sports societies..
After the World War II, along with the competition among the first teams, there were also conducted official competitions among reserve squads. It carried the name of "Tournament of the Doubles". The reserve squads' competitions were running parallel to the first teams' competitions, normally scheduled a day prior, with relegation rules completely dependent on the league standing of their respective first team.
The Top League was one of the best football leagues in Europe, ranking second among the UEFA members in the 1988–89 season. Three of its representatives reached the finals of the European club tournaments on four occasions: FC Dynamo Kyiv, FC Dinamo Tbilisi, and FC Dynamo Moscow. In the same way Russia politically succeeded the Soviet Union, UEFA considers the Russian Premier League to have succeeded the Soviet Top League.
Overview
Introduction and popularization
The league was established on the initiative of head of Spartak sport society, Nikolai Starostin. Starostin proposed to create eight professional club teams in six Soviet cities and hold two championship tournaments per calendar year. With minor corrections, the Soviet Council on Physical Culture accepted Starostin's proposal, creating a league of "demonstration teams of masters" which were sponsored by sport societies and factories. Nikolai Starostin de facto became a godfather of the Soviet championships. Numerous mass events took place to promote the newly established competition, among which there was an introduction of football exhibition game as part of the Moscow Physical Culture Day parade, and the invitation to the Basque Country national football team which was on the side supported by Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War and others.In 1936, the first secretary of Komsomol, Kosarev, came up with the idea of playing an actual football game at the Red Square as part of the Physical Culture Day parade. Stalin never attended any sports events, but the Physical Culture Day was an exclusion to the rule. The 1936 Physical Culture Day parade was directed by Russian theatre director Valentin Pluchek. For the football game, a giant green felt carpet was sewn by Spartak athletes and laid down on the Red Square's cobblestones. A night before the parade, the rug was stitched together in sections, rolled up and then stored in a vestibule of the GUM department store located at the square. Following the 1936 Red Square game, it became a tradition before the World War II and part of the Physical Culture Day parade event.
In the late 1930s Spartak was giving out thousands of tickets per game to members of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party. Among serious football fans was Lavrentiy Beria who proposed to have one team from each of union republics in the league. In July 1937 a conflict erupted following a successful tour to the Soviet Union of the Basque national team during which the main governing body of sports in the country, the All-Union Council of Physical Culture, was accused by the party and Komsomol for failing the sports policy. Spartak's leadership and Starostin in particular were accused of corruption and implementing "bourgeoisie methods" in Soviet sport.
The most prominent clubs of the league were FC Dynamo Kyiv, FC Spartak Moscow, and FC Dynamo Moscow. The most popular clubs besides the above-mentioned were PFC CSKA Moscow, FC Ararat Yerevan, and FC Dinamo Tbilisi. Dinamo Tbilisi became famous for finishing third but never winning the title.
They won their first title in 1964.
Development
Until the 1960s the main title contenders in the league were the Moscow clubs of Spartak and Dynamo whose dominance was disrupted for only a brief period after World War II by CSKA Moscow, nicknamed 'The team of lieutenants'. The first team that won 10 championships was Dynamo Moscow in 1963, followed by Spartak in 1979.Eleven clubs spent over 30 seasons in the league, with five of them from Moscow. Dynamo Moscow and Dynamo Kyiv were the only clubs that participated in all seasons of the league. Among other prominent Russian clubs were SKA Rostov/Donu, Zenit Leningrad, and Krylia Sovietov Kuibyshev.
Over the years, the league changed; however, from the 1970s its competition structure solidified with 16 participants, except from 1979 through 1985 when the number of participants was extended to 18.
One uniquely Soviet innovation around this time was the "draw limit", whereby a team would receive zero points for any draws above a fixed number, first 8, then 10. This rule had consequences for both the title race and relegation while it was in place. A 1973 experiment to resolve drawn games by penalty shoot-out lasted only one season.
Dynamo Kyiv's success as a Ukrainian club was supplemented in the 1980s with the appearance of Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk led by its striker Oleh Protasov, who set a new record for goals scored in a season. In 1984, Zenit Leningrad became Soviet champions for the first time.
With the unravelling of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the structure of the league also became unstable as more and more clubs lost interest in continuing to participate in the league, prompting several rounds of reorganisation. The main effect of these was to boost the number of Ukrainian clubs to be on par with the Russians.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been suggested that the competition be re-established along the lines of the Commonwealth of Independent States Cup, but due to a lack of interest on various levels, the venture has never been implemented.
Participants
The uneven population of the Soviet Union meant that the participants in a typical Top League season fell into three blocs. This was particularly apparent at the lower tiers of the Soviet Football Championship, such as the third tier, but sustained with less transparency up to the top/first tier.- Russian clubs. Russian football was dominated by the "four-wheeled cart" of Moscow clubs: Spartak, Dynamo, CSKA and Torpedo. These four were often joined in the Top League by Lokomotiv, Zenit Leningrad, or assorted clubs from smaller cities. Please note that although officially the Lokomotiv sports society represented "railroad workers", the Soviet Union also had an oversized number of railway troops, unlike any other country in the world. Also, "the Russian clubs' bloc" was deeply fragmented into three separate conditional sub-blocs, per se, such as Muscovite clubs, Leningrad clubs, and the RSFSR clubs. At the Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR, the Russian SFSR was always represented by three teams with Muscovite and Leningrad teams participating along with the "main" team, although the main team was always the Muscovite.
- Ukrainian clubs. Ukraine's capital Kyiv, by contrast, was the exclusive province of Dynamo Kyiv, who became an unofficial feeder for the Soviet national team beginning in the 1960s, replacing Dynamo Moscow. Several clubs vied to be Ukraine's "second" team over the years including Shakhtar Donetsk, Metalist Kharkiv, Chernomorets Odesa, Zorya Voroshilovgrad and Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, the last two managing to win three titles combined. Many Ukrainian clubs were also associated with the Soviet Dynamo sports society. The Soviet football authorities tried to curb or even out the Ukrainian clubs with the other clubs from the "union republics", yet there consistently existed a "separate" competition among the Ukrainian clubs among "teams of masters".
- Other republics clubs. Lavrentiy Beria's vision of one representative club per republic was partly realised from the 1950s onwards, as in every republic except for Russia and Ukraine, fan interest and government support became concentrated into a single club based in the republic's capital city, which became "the republic's team". Most of those clubs were created as Spartak or Dynamo, supported either by the local party committee or the local KGB office. Thus Lithuania became represented by Zalgiris Vilnius, Latvia by Daugava Riga, Estonia by Kalev Tallinn, Byelorussia by Dinamo Minsk, Moldavia by Nistru Kishinev, Armenia by Ararat Yerevan, Azerbaijan by Neftchi Baku, Georgia by Dinamo Tbilisi, Kazakhstan by Kairat Alma-Ata, Uzbekistan by Pakhtakor Tashkent and Tajikistan by Pamir Dushanbe. A typical Top League season would feature 4-6 of these eleven, and Yerevan, Minsk and Tbilisi all managed to win the title at least once. Only Georgia, with Torpedo Kutaisi and later Guria Lanchkhuti, and Azerbaijan, with Dinamo Kirovabad, was ever able to have a second representative survive in the Top League in addition to their capital city club.