Spartak Moscow’s Armenian striker Yura Movsisyan is close to returning to Major League Soccer (MLS). Championat.com reported on Sunday that Movsisyan’s agent Patrick McCabe has confirmed that negotiations are taking place between Spartak Moscow, MLS, and Real Salt Lake.
The Salt Lake Tribune meanwhile reported that a deal between Movsisyan and Real Salt Lake was all but done. Movsisyan had previously played for Salt Lake between 2005 and 2009. Movsisyan then left Salt Lake in 2010 to play for Randers FC in Denmark, but just before he left MLS, Real Salt Lake offered him a contract extension, which means that Salt Lake retained the player’s MLS rights—MLS operates as a franchise system in which outside players are signed by the league and not clubs.
Movsisyan has become surplus material at the Otkrytie Arena now that Spartak are close to signing the Paraguayan striker Lorenzo Melgarejo from Kuban Krasnodar. Spartak currently have nine legionnaires on their books and adding Melgarejo to the squad would raise this number to ten. With possible changes to the foreign limitation rule on the horizon—the Russian Football Union wants to cap foreigners to six per squad—Spartak are looking to trim the number of foreigners on their squad.
This season, Movsisyan has played 11 games in which he scored three goals and provided two assists, and has only averaged a mediocre whoscored.com score of 6.64. Despite having been featured more often this season, Movsisyan has been at odds with Spartak’s management since last season when he started in only nine games. It is understood that Movsisyan had a bad relationship with Spartak’s former coach Murat Yakin.
Murat Yakin was fired by Spartak at end of the 2014-15 season and was replaced with Dmitriy Alenichev. The relationship between Movsisyan and Spartak’s management seemed unsalvageable, however, and Movsisyan was already expected to leave the club last summer, when some clubs from Europe showed an interest in him.
In the end, Movsisyan was unable to find a new club and, instead, remained in Moscow. Now, however, it appears that the difficult marriage between Movsisyan and Spartak has finally ended.
For Movsisyan, a return to the MLS will mean going back to where his career began. Although an ethnic Armenian, Movsisyan was actually born in Baku, Azerbaijan during the time of the Soviet Union. His family left Azerbaijan for the United States in the dying days of the Soviet Union in order to escape the conflict that had erupted between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Movsisyan played football in college for the Pasadena Lancers, and then from 2006 to 2009 played four seasons in the MLS for the Kansas City Wizards (now Sporting Kansas City) and the above-mentioned Real Salt Lake. Hence, Movsisyan’s transfer to Salt Lake is, for the Armenian striker, a return to his roots.
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