St. Petersburg, Mar 28, Sergey Yaremenko. Sports Director of the Russian Football Union (RFU) Andrey Leksakov expressed the hope that the youth national teams of Russia in June will be admitted to international competitions, which will serve as the first step for the return of the national team to the international arena. The International Football Federation (FIFA) and the Union of European Football associations (UEFA) in February suspended Russian teams and clubs from participating in all international competitions for an indefinite period due to the situation in Ukraine. On Monday, Leksakov held a meeting with the coaches of youth teams at the center for advanced training of coaches at the Academy of St. Petersburg «Zenith». Born in 2004 should play in the first qualifying round, then 2006, the girls' team should play.We are waiting for the June cutoff from UEFA.Maybe the youth teams will be officially allowed to participate in international competitions, and then the chain will be pulled to the national team.Or vice versa, we will wait for the cutoff for the national team, so that all teams have the opportunity to participate,» Leksakov told reporters. «We received an invitation for autumn from Hungary, Italy and Croatia for the participation of youth teams. We understand that this is a general mailing list, but they do not exclude our men's and women's teams teams from us participating,» Leksakov said. «We do not leave hope that they will allow Asian countries to play friendly matches with us. It will be difficult to negotiate with the Europeans, but China, Iran, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, perhaps even the DPRK could play with our teams. This would help maintain a certain level of training of Russian football players,» Leksakov added.
