Current three-times champion, and heavy favorites to 4-peat, Zenit Kazan has just solicited CEV to host the Final 4 of this year’s Champions League, according to Rt-online.ru. Although one of the most successful teams in Europe, Zenit Kazan never hosted the final phase of the competition before.
The last three editions of the competition’s Final 4 were hosted by Italy’s Perugia at Rome, Poland’s Asseco Resovia at Krakow, and Germany’s Berlin Recycling at Berlin. A Russian club last hosted the event in 2013, when Lokomotiv Novosibirsk received the teams in Omsk.
Having the event in Zenit seems like the logic decision for the European Volleyball Federation. Russia has two of the strongest teams in the competition in Zenit Kazan and Lokomotiv Novosibirsk. Plus, there is no denying that Zenit, the current world champions, is the real star of this edition of the tournament, with its diamond studded cast that includes Wilfredo Leon, Matt Anderson, and the current MVP of the tournament Maxim Mikhaylov. Why deny it the chance of being only the second team of all time to go for four straight CL titles (CSKA Moscow in the 80’s), in its home-soil? It’s not like Perugia, Zaksa, and Civitanova are some small-market teams in the Netherlands who will have trouble finding money to make their trip to Russia anyway.
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