Vasily BogdanovSport correspondentAll materialsUfa striker Hamid Agalarov has definitely become the main figure of the 2021/22 season on an individual basis. A year ago, the club's management doubted whether he was ready to play for the first team, and now he has more than 70 percent of all the team's goals on his account. The 21-year-old striker has become a transfer target for all Russian top clubs, and has also aroused interest abroad. Next summer, «Ufa» with its help will definitely break the record for the largest sale in its history. understands how Agalarov turned into the main rising star of the RPL. He reminded of Simutenkov, bypassed Dziuba There was a period in the Russian championship when the title of top scorer at the end of the season went to legionnaires from year to year, and not to local players. Over the course of eight draws, foreigners scored the most goals. Only in the 2015/16 season Fedor Smolov lifted the curse. In the five subsequent championships, legionnaires came to the fore only twice — in the 2017/18 season, where Quincy Promes was the first (15 goals), and in the 2019/20 season, when Serdar Azmun shared the palm with Artem Dzyuba (17 each) . And now, once again, a local player is at the head of the list of top scorers, and only one foreigner has crept into the top five — Mateo Cassierra from Sochi (11). This cannot but please the coaching staff of the Russian national team, even though Artem Dzyuba, Dmitry Poloz, and Fedor Smolov have already exchanged their forties. />
Agalarov's achievement is unique in many ways. First of all, because of age, since in such a young age only Igor Simutenkov (season 1994, 21 goals) and Fedor Chalov (season 2018/19, 15 goals) became the top scorers of the RPL. In addition, after the 2011/12 transitional season, only Fedor Smolov (season 2015/16, 20 goals) and Artem Dzyuba (season 2020/21, 20 goals) scored more than the Ufa forward in 30 rounds. Not to mention the fact that for the first time in the history of the championships of Russia, a representative of Ufa won the sniper race. And in general, never before has the laurels of the best scorer been given to a player of a team struggling for survival. So the honored coach of Russia, Gadzhi Gadzhiev, who watched Agalarov’s career from the front row, admitted that the forward’s statistics impressed him. “Hamid’s ability to become an excellent striker was not a revelation for me. It all started a long time ago, and his potential was known. The same Shamil Gazizov immediately drew attention to him and said that he was the strongest striker of his age. I felt that he was already ready to score in the RPL, but, of course, no one could have imagined that the statistics would be so impressive. Here it just became a revelation,» Hajiyev said.
