When Serdar Tasci left Spartak Moscow in January, he did not intend to return to Russia once his loan deal with Bayern Munich was over. “Tasci doesn’t wish to return to Russia,” his agent Ahmet Bulut told TASS in the beginning of June.
Tasci, who was a regular at Spartak in the first half of the season, decided to leave the club after the fans reacted to the political crisis between Turkey and Russia by burning Turkish flags on the stands.
“The fans at a game in Russia burned a Turkish flag,” Bulut told Turkish media Fanatik in February, “Which Serdar was not pleased about, and the situation started to become unbearable. He felt uncomfortable with the situation, and wanted to leave Russia.”
The diplomatic crisis that started in November last year when a Russian fighter jet and a rescue helicopter were shot down over Turkey made all Russian clubs cancel their upcoming winter training camps in Turkey after advice from the Russian Football Union, while sports minister Vitaly Mutko said that all Russian athletes should avoid the country unless they absolutely had to go.
Tasci played just three games during his six months in Germany, and although he expressed a wish to stay in Bavaria, Bayern’s signing of Dortmund’s Mats Hummels has blocked that wish from becoming reality as reported by Kicker.
Instead, the Red-Whites are working actively on selling Tasci, who doesn’t lack suitors at the moment. The main interest is currently coming from Turkey, where both Fenerbahce and Trabzonspor have been eyeing the German-Turkish central defender, but Italian side Fiorentina have also expressed an interest.
Trabzonspor seems to be leading the race, and Turkish media have already reported that the Red-Whites turned down an offer of €1 million plus the former Lokomotiv Moscow striker Dame N’Doye in the beginning of June, but Spartak are reportedly demanding €1.5 million plus N’Doye, and the two clubs are expected to reach finalize talks sometime during this week.
“I don’t think Tasci wants to play for us,” Spartak head coach Dmitri Alenichev told TASS in May, “He left for Germany and got a taste for European football again.” Since then, the Red-Whites have also lost Sergey Bryzgalov to Terek Grozny, leaving them with just Salvatore Bocchetti and the inexperienced Aleksandr Putsko and Ilya Kutepov as well as the unpopular Vladimir Granat as options in the central defence. Spartak and Alenichev have therefore started to look for replacements for Tasci, to improve the defence that conceded 39 goals last season, more than any team in the top seven.
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