Capturing the world of Russian amateur football, one game at a time

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/25/russia-football-sergey-novikov-grasslands

Version 0 of 1.

Beating on drums and chanting loudly, two dozen supporters of FC Semyonov football club march across their local team’s pitch and take their places in the stands.

Down on the grass, photographer Sergey Novikov is instructing the 11 local players how to stand as he takes a pre-match photo, before the game against FC Spartak Tumbotino begins.

The shots Novikov takes are part of his ongoing project, Grassroots, which has seen the 35-year-old spend the past three years travelling around central and western Russia to photograph amateur football teams and their stadiums.

Focusing as much on what lies beyond the pitch as who is playing on it, Grassroots is more than just a collection of sports photography. From the sparse pitches in the far north of the country to fields in central Russia surrounded by churches, Novikov’s project also offers a glimpse into everyday life in the furthest of Russia’s regions.

“For me it is always interesting to look at what surrounds the stadium: how does it fit into the urban landscape?” Novikov says. “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 if it was an ancient fortress.”

‘Sport, or alcohol’

Novikov works in Moscow as a photo editor for culture news site Colta.ru. He devotes much of his spare time to Grassroots, funding the project out of his own pocket. “The problem is when … you have to travel really far for one photo, it’s very expensive,” he says. In order to make the trips worthwhile, he tries to attend two or three games in the same area over a weekend.

Given the amateur status of the teams that he photographs, Novikov’s plans are prone to disruption. He recalls travelling to the northern town of Kirovsk in the Murmansk region only to find out the match had been cancelled. It turned out that a day of mourning had been declared after more than a dozen local officials were killed in a helicopter crash.

Plans to watch another team in the Nizhny Novgorod region also fell through after the club – FC Ruslan, named after a character in Alexander Pushkin’s poem Ruslan and Lyudmila – withdrew from the game citing financial reasons. Novikov says problems with money are the main reason for cancellations.

When asked why Russian supporters should shun professional clubs in order to watch amateur teams, Novikov notes that grassroots matches say a lot about real life.

“Stadiums are especially important in provincial towns because they are often the only place that members of the local population can let off some steam. When everything is going badly at work, when you face chaos and corruption in your town, when your wife leaves you for another man then you have two options: sport, or alcohol.”

To find clubs to take part in his project, Novikov scrolls through fixtures on the websites of regional championship federations and then contacts them via Russia’s VKontakte social media site. Two towns in particular took weeks of planning to photograph – Snezhnogorsk and Polyarny in Murmansk. These , like other so-called closed cities, are successors of Soviet towns which house military or nuclear facilities, locked-off to non-residents. For Novikov’s visit official minders accompanied him to and from the games.

Grassroots is still a work in progress, and Novikov says he wants to extend his project eastward beyond the Ural Mountains and into Siberia. His aim is to complete the project by 2018, when Russia will host the Fifa football World Cup.

Related: Fifa scandal fallout: Russia in disbelief over threat to World Cup 2018

Grassroots is not Novikov’s first football-inspired project. A previous series titled FC Volga United saw him photograph amateur and professional clubs dotted along the banks of the Volga River. It was during this time that Novikov realised: “how diverse the footballing landscape of the country was and decided to do Grassroots to document the more unique and interesting pitches across Russia.”

The stadium in Semyonov comprises one stand overlooking a synthetic pitch that is dotted with sand-filled holes. Behind the stand lies a copse of birch trees, where several cows are grazing. A herd of cows once almost wandered onto the pitch at another match, Novikov says.

He says he always shoots the team before the game because after the match the weather – or the players’ moods – might change.

Teams usually respond well to having their photo taken, but Novikov notes the players often act very seriously. “Sometimes when I do a group photo, I feel like adding a bit of irony … so if someone not connected to the team comes into the frame, I’m for this.”

No sooner has the day’s game kicked off than the group of raucous FC Semyonov fans let off a flare, prompting five or so policemen to march over.

“That will be a 3,000 rouble [£35] fine,” says a middle-aged man dressed in a suit and with glasses perched on the end of his nose, marking the violation down on his clipboard. He’s a match inspector from the regional football federation,and spends the rest of the game lurking around for possible infractions.

At least one police car and a medical officer are obliged to attend every football match organised through football federations, says Novikov, pointing to the designated doctor for today’s game – a middle-aged woman wearing three-inch heels and a nurse’s apron underneath her coat.

In the 70th minute, one of the home players punches an opponent in the face and is sent off. Later, the same side’s goalkeeper is ordered off after he flattens an attacking player just outside the penalty box.

FC Semyonov did eventually pull a goal back, but a 45-yard lob sealed the win for Spartak Tumbotino, who won the match 3-1. The two dozen hardcore Semyonov fans left about five minutes before the end of the match, releasing several flares outside the stadium gates as they went.

This article originally appeared on The Moscow Times. Click here to see a gallery of Novikov’s work