USSR. A very difficult season for assessment. It was not normal and the results of it somewhat contradicted the general impression of ascending Soviet football. On one hand there was new champion and tremendous battle for the title to the very last moment – something rare in USSR. On the other hand the leading clubs were unconvincing. As a whole, the impressions were positive, but they went hand in hand with harsh criticism of the national team. The championship was affected by events having nothing to do with it – if it was another country, that is. In a nut shell, half of the season was concentrated on the preparation of the national team for the 1982 World Cup, then the actual event, and after that – on analyzing what happened what happened and why, culminating with the change of the national team coaches. After that Brezhnev died. Somehow the championship was secondary for the most of the year – literary so, for the coaches of Dinamo (Kiev), Spartak (Moscow), and Dinamo (Tbilisi) also coached the national team and were preoccupied with it. And the national team was largely made of players from this three clubs, thus they had to play with substitutes quite a few games. No wonder the championship became the year of the ‘dark horse’. Usually, in similar cases, some otherwise ordinary team pops up from the back, but, as a rule of thumb, such teams are one-time wonders. The new Soviet champion was not that, yet, how good they really were? There were various records set this year and most of them went to the side of the positive. This much in a nut shell. The rest was familiar, but needs reminding: there were limits to the tied games – 10 in First Division and 12 in Second Division. Going above the limit brought no points. The rule affected Second Division. The Cup final was in May, which tremendously shortened the tournament, but USSR often changed the date of the final – now the reason was seemingly the World Cup, but there was one difficulty: it was practically impossible to amalgamate Cup and championship in evaluating the season: the Cup was no real indication for the strength of a team, for everybody reached best form after May. Lastly, the Second Division was reduced from 24 to 22 teams. Two clubs changed names – in Lvov Karpaty and SKA amalgamated into SKA Karpaty, and in Dzhizak Buston was renamed to Zvezda (Star).
The Third Division brought very little attention – there was no much anyway, but this year it was reduced to almost nothing. No surprise, really – many clubs, but what kind of clubs? Some eventually climbed out of obscurity later in the 1980s, like
Niva (Vinnitza) and
Gomselmash (Rostov-on-Don).
The biggest name was Krylya Sovetov (Kyubyshev)
Dark period for a club just a few years earlier playing in the First Division.
But all that was immaterial – the only important thing was the promotional tournament. The massive Third Division was divided into 9 zones and the champions went to play-off for the three promotional places. At this final stage they were divided into 3 groups of 3 teams each, playing 2-leg round-robin. Former Second Division members were the favourites, pretty much as ever before – four clubs. The final tournament went almost as expected:
Group 1: Tekstilshtik (Ivanovo) 2 1 1 5-4 5
Spartak (Ordzhonikidze) 1 2 1 5-4 4
Kotayk (Abovyan) 1 1 2 3-5 3
Group 2: Dnepr (Mogilev) 3 1 0 9-3 7
Dinamo (Samarkand) 2 0 2 8-7 4
Bukovina (Chernovtzy) 1 0 3 5-10 2
Group 3: Kuzbass (Kemerovo) 3 1 0 9-3 7
Shakhter (Karaganda) 1 1 2 4-5 3
Lokomotiv (Chelyabinsk) 1 0 3 2-7 2
Kuzbass and Tekstilshtik returning to Second Division and Dnepr – a debutante. The promotion of Kuzbass was important not only because the team was considered the strongest among the candidates – Vitaly Razdaev was playing there. Already the top all-time scorer of Second Division with 161 goals. Already becoming a legend. It was great that he would have chance to increase his numbers and also it was interesting: he was unreachable scorer already, yet, he missed a few second division seasons.
Dnepr (Mogilev) was also interesting: first, because they were the first club from Belarus promoted to Second Division. So far, only one Belarussian club played at this level – Dinamo (Minsk) – but they came from First Division. But 1982 was Dinamo (Minsk) year and with Dnepr promoted it looked like Belarussian football finally came to live.