Football battles at SKOLKOVO

In the late April the SKOLKOVO Campus sports complex hosted the first football tournament among our students – the Executive MBA programme participants.

The idea of such a tournament was brough by the two students of the EMBA second intake – Mikhail Bratanov and Dmitry Orlov – who organized the whole event by themselves and invited also the first intake graduates, so as to have all the four EMBA groups take part in the competition.

The tournament included 4 games each of 15 minutes, with 5-minute brakes in between. Each game was a very tough and dramatic competition with a certain share of passion and staginess. The rousing cheer leaders’ shows support students’ teams in the brakes. So you wouldn’t be bored a minute

Our mini-championship started right at a play-off stage where we saw two games: EMBA-2 against EMBA-4, and EMBA-1 against EMBA-3. The teams who lost – EMBA-1 and EMBA-2 – then had a battle for the third place, and the victory went to the latest. It needs to be noted that the graduates’ team (EMBA-1) had to face tough conditions, as they had to play two games one right after another (the play-off game and the third place game) and had no chance to rest and restore between the two. By the way, the EMBA-2 team is considered to be very strong football players, as they had almost always won the friendly matches being often organized by the students after their classes during the programme modules.

So, the final game was ahead! We saw the scramble betweenthe the EMBA-3 team and the SKOLKOVO newcomers – EMBA-4 who started their classes in January only.

What a passionate and tough game that was! Indeed that was the first tournament of such a scale and the struggle was actually for a good prize. The girls were shouting for their classmates who showed all their mettle and will-to-win spirit on a football ground. Finally it was EMBA-3 who won the championship.

Here are the results:
1 place - ЕМВА-3
2 place - ЕМВА-4
3 place - ЕМВА-2

And that was not the end still – we also had a separate competition for the best kit. The voters were all the ladies from the EMBA groups, EMBA-1 graduates’ children, our faculty members and independent experts.

EMBA-3 turned out to be the winners in that category as well for their original idea: they were wearing claret and golden uniform with the “ЁMBA” letters on the back. The second and the fourth EMBA groups were wearing classical colours – purple and lilac with white – the official colours of the SKOLKOVO EMBA programme.

The graduates’ uniform deserves a special mention as well – they have chosen two images and played the first game in the yellow neon t-shirts while during the second game they were wearing the red ones.

We would like to say a special thank you to “Planet Fitness” and the club manager Alexey for all the help they generously gave us in organizing the tournament, as well as for the refereeing that let our tournament be held as a real professional football championship with the spirit of competition and friendliness at the same time.

Our warmest congratulations to the winners! We hope such tournaments soon become the new SKOLKOVO tradition!