World Footy News

The Russian city of St Petersburg is the nations second largest city behind Moscow. With a population of close to five million people, the city sits on the Neva River where the water flows gently into Neva Bay, then the Gulf of Finland and eventually the Baltic Sea.

The city, previously known as both Petrograd and Leningrad, has a rich history. It is also the new home of Australian Rules football in Russia with the inception of the mighty St Petersburg Cats football club.

Viacheslav (Slava) Belov is one of the driving forces behind the new club. According to Slava, "Our club was founded on the 10th June 2014 sitting at a pub on the banks of the Neva River at our IGM. We elected our president, treasurer and secretary." And so, the club was formed.
Slava comes with a strong Australian Rules football background, having been a part of the wildly successful West London Wildcats teams of recent years in England. His experience will be of enormous value to the new club.

“We have eight full members of the club, and up to 20 in total who participate in training. Our training sessions take place in the heart of the city in Tavrichesky Gardens.”

Having those numbers will be necessary in the near future as matches will most likely come from intra-club matches between themselves, though Slava and the team certainly have broader ideas for the future.

Slava explains that “our short term goal is to get a squad together for the Gargarin Cup, the annual season opener taking place in Moscow and organised by AFL Russia. [But] our longer term goal is to become a hub connecting Nordic Australian Rules football clubs to Moscow Australian football clubs.”

It is this strategic outlook which makes the St Petersburg club a potential catalyst for future growth, particularly across Russia and Finland, but possibly beyond in time. Whilst St Petersburg is just over 700 kilometres from Moscow, making a fairly lengthy trip to undertake, the city is less than 400 kilometres from Helsinki, the capital city of Finland. This puts them close to Finnish clubs in Helsinki and Turku, and even closer to towns such as Lappeenranta where the game was beginning to grow a couple of years ago. The growth of the Cats might be a way of pulling together the Russian and Finnish clubs in future developments and may later lead to links with the teams in Sweden and beyond.

But for now it is enough that we welcome the St Petersburg Cats to the European football scene. Having just received an AFL Europe Start-Up Club Grant for footys and jerseys from the SAFF (Stockholm Region Australian Rules Football Federation) and the Solna Axemen, the Cats are up and away.

The Gargarin Cup is not that far away, so World Footy News will keep an eye on the progress of the Russian footy season, and in particular the rise of the St Petersburg Cats as they purr their way onto the AFL Europe stage.



Left: The St Petersburg team kitted up and ready to go.