Sixfold! The key points about Zenit's RPL championship win

We tell you the most important numbers from Zenit St. Petersburg’s early Russian Premier Liga title win.

First place in number of RPL titles is now shared by Zenit and CSKA Moscow. Both clubs have been champions six times, while the Armymen have not won the league since the 2015/16 season. The most titled club in Russian Championship history is Spartak Moscow, who became 10-time champions in 2017.

357 days passed from the start of Zenit’s RPL campaign to them winning the championship. On 14 July 2019, they kicked off the league season with a 2-1 home victory over newcomers FC Tambov, and on 5 July 2020 they sealed the title by beating FC Krasnodar 4-2. Zenit went the longest to win the title in the transitional 2011/12 campaign: on 13 March 2011, they beat Terek Grozny 1-0 in the opening round, and guaranteed the championship on 28 April 2012 when they defeated Dynamo Moscow 2-1 at the Petrovsky Stadium. There were three matchdays left before the end of the season.

Zenit racked up 62 points over 26 matchdays – no team has ever accumulated more than 60 points over that timescale before. That total was achieved by Zenit in the title-winning seasons of 2010 and 2014/15, and for Spartak in championship season 2016/17. In terms of number of wins at this stage, Zenit also equaled the Red and Whites with 19, which is another all-time RPL record.

Forward Artem Dzyuba has totalled 27 direct goal contributions to make this the most productive season in his career. The 31-year-old is the RPL's leader scorer with 16 goals and is also the top assist-maker with 11. His previous best season for Zenit was his debut campaign for them when he registered 15 goals and nine assists in the 2015/16 season. He is only one goal short of his personal RPL record set in the 2013/14 season while on loan at FC Rostov when he scored 17 times.

26 matchdays was all it took for Zenit to win the championship. Before that, the earliest winners were confirmed by matchday 27; Rubin in 2008, Spartak in 2017, and Zenit themselves in 2019. And last season, the Blue-White-Sky Blues became champions not on the pitch, but on a plane: when Lokomotiv Moscow lost to Arsenal in Tula and lost the chance to catch the leaders, the team were flying back to St. Petersburg from Grozny, where they had drawn with Akhmat.

Just 23 minutes Zenit managed in the championship without defender Douglas Santos, who moved last summer from Hamburg. The Brazilian is the only Zenit player who appeared in the starting lineup in all 26 games and only didn’t finish one match, on 9 March against FC Ufa, when he was replaced in the 67th minute. A total of 26 players played for the team in the League, three of whom left during the season: Denis Terentyev, Mathias Kranevitter and Robert Mak.

For the 10th time in 10 years, defender Yaroslav Rakitsky has won a national championship. The former Shakhtar player won the first Ukrainian Premier League title in 2009/10, his debut campaign with the Donetsk club. Before moving to Zenit in the winter of 2019, Rakitsky won the title at Shakhtar six more times, and at the end of last season he won two championships at once, having played 11 matches in the Ukrainian championship, and 12 in the RPL.

Eight-time champion of Russia – this status now belongs to Zenit head coach Sergey Semak. During his playing career, the former midfielder won the RPL five times: twice with both Rubin (2008, 2009) and Zenit (2010, 2011/12), while his first title came at CSKA Moscow in 2003. After switching to coaching, Semak was champion as assistant to Andre Villas-Boas (2014/15), and has now won the championship as a head coach for the second consecutive season.

Five coaches in the history of the RPL have finished top two years in a row. Semak has become the second Zenit manager to achieve this. The first was Luciano Spalletti, with whom the current Blue-White-Sky Blues head coach won titles in 2010 and 2012 as a player. CSKA have also had two back-to-back title-winning managers – Valery Gazzaev (2005, 2006) and Leonid Slutsky (2012/13, 2013/14) – while the last was former Rubin Kazan coach Kurban Berdyev (2008, 2009), whose Semak was captain of the championship-winning sides team.

Four players became RPL Champions with both Zenit and CSKA. The first was again Semak, first winning with the Armymen (2003), and then with Zenit. Roman Shirokov did it in reverse order: after two championships with Spalletti's Zenit, he lifted the title with CSKA in 2016. Last season, they were joined by Yuri Zhirkov, champion with CSKA in 2005 and 2006, and this year by Vyacheslav Karavaev, who played two games for the Red and Blues in the 2013/14 title-winning season. Incidentally, for Zhirkov the current RPL title win is the fourth in his career, more than all other Zenit players.

A third championship in different countries was won by two foreign players who came to Zenit last summer; defender Yordan Osorio and forward Malcom. Firstly, both were champions at their first professional clubs, Venezuela's Zamora and Brazil's Corinthians. In the 2017/18 season, Osorio won the Portuguese championship with Porto, and Malcom won the Spanish LaLiga with Barcelona a year later, after which both players moved to St. Petersburg.

Two league titles in England and Russia have been won by Zenit captain Branislav Ivanovic. The Serbian spent nine years at Chelsea in London and during that time won the English Premier League twice – in 2009/10 and 2014/15 – as well as winning the Champions League and the Europa League. In the winter of 2017, the defender became a Blue-White-Sky Blue player, with whom he has now also won two championships. Ivanovic, having scored four goals, has already had his highest-scoring RPL season. His previous best was three goals in 2007 while still with Lokomotiv Moscow, after which he left for Chelsea.

Midfielder Alexey Sutormin has received one medal in each professional League. From 2010 to 2012, he played for the youth team of Zenit, then moved to Strogino, where in the 2014/15 season he became a bronze medalist of the PFL championship where one of the rivals in the West zone was, as it turned out, Zenit-II. The midfielder spent the next three seasons in the FNL and in 2018 won the championship with FC Orenburg. In the summer of 2019 Sutormin returned to St. Petersburg from Rubin, against whom he scored his debut goals for Zenit and became an RPL champion for the first time. In the championship-winning match against FC Krasnodar, he came on as a substitute and scored the fourth goal.

Photo: Zenit