Spartak Moscow has been banned from the Europa League. The club makes fun of the expulsion with TikTok videos.
Coaches are quitting their jobs in droves, half teams are leaving the clubs, international bans apply to all competitions – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has far-reaching consequences for Russian football. A good three and a half years ago, the World Cup was still celebrated in their own country, but now it is threatened with insignificance. The league continues despite a brief discussion about cancellation.
It might just be the beginning. On Monday evening, the world association Fifa approved a special transfer window for foreign players in Russia and Ukraine in order to be able to leave their clubs at least temporarily. The social media department of Spartak Moscow, which in turn had been excluded from the Europa League, has not lost its sense of humor despite the end-of-time football mood.
On the contrary. Those responsible for Spartak’s Tiktok channel take a different approach. A completely different one! The club published several videos on the social media platform last week, in which the club made fun of the Uefa decision. It started with a video showing the club’s bewilderment. In a classroom, a woman danced lasciviously in front of a young man, who only looked apathetically into the distance. Sequences of Spartak players celebrating in the Europa League followed. Then the social media managers publish a video that went viral. And how! It already has more than 4.3 million views, almost 500,000 likes and more than 5,000 comments.
In it: Under the title “Spartak excluded from the Europa League” you can see a young woman obviously artificially crying, who puts a smile in between when Spartak’s 6-1 league victory is shown after the sacking. Also worth seeing: A baby that is written with the actual Europa League opponent RB Leipzig. It cries when it sees the last Spartak victories and laughs maliciously when the top club is kicked out. Or: With film sequences from the blockbuster “Wolf of Wall Street”, the club makes fun of the Tiktok censorship in Russia. “I am not f****** leaving,” Leonardo DiCaprio roars. How Spartak bypasses censorship himself? Probably like many in Russia: via VPN.
The performance of Spartak’s social media department is both celebrated and criticized online. “By far the best Tiktok of a football club, a must for every fan,” says one review, for example. Another said ironically: “No one is safe from the funniest social media account of a football club ever.” Meanwhile, critical voices can mainly be found in the comments of the individual Tiktoks. “The irony is tasteless,” rages one user. From Italy it says: “We don’t like that in Napoli.”
However, most of the comments below the popular videos degenerate into heated discussions as to whether the exclusion of the Russian teams from international competitions is justified. Here, too, opinions differ. For the Russian Football Association it is clear: The world association Fifa and the European Football Union Uefa had no legal basis for their decision, the association justified the step on Thursday. Therefore, the RFS appealed to the Sports Court (CAS).
