Eduard Spertsyan: Armenia captain perfect puzzle piece for new-look Al Ahli

If you don’t move forward, you’re going backwards.

That, evidently, is the mantra of Al Ahli this off-season as two veterans depart, replaced by younger, fresher blood as the Jeddah giants look to take that final jump from Roshn Saudi League contender to champion.

Out have gone Franck Kessie and Riyad Mahrez, two players that will be remembered as greats in Saudi Arabia’s second city, helping deliver back-to-back continental titles and establishing a new era for Al Ahli.

But, having achieved so much, the club saw this as the ideal time to refresh the squad by recruiting players of a slightly different profile. Thus, one of the fresh faces this season is Armenia captain Eduard Spertsyan, who will step into the midfield role vacated by Kessie.

Expect their remits to differ, however, as they are contrasting types of players. Kessie is more a classic box-to-box midfielder - a No.8 if you like your football lingo in those terms - who often was employed more advanced because of the style of Al Ahli’s game.

Yet Spertsyan is more naturally at home in an even-increased attacking midfield slot - a No.10, if you will - a role he played brilliantly for Krasnodar across the past few seasons as they rose to the top of the Russian Premier League, winning a first-ever title in 2024-25.

In each of the past four seasons, Spertsyan scored 10 or more goals, and in two of those four also added 10-plus assists as well.

Undeniably, he was one of the standout players across the entire league last season, a career best personally for the 26-year-old, with 13 goals and 16 assists.

The haul put Spertsyan second for goals in the league (only teammate Jhon Cordoba scored more) and first for assists, combining overall to be ranked first for goal contributions.

While he might not carry the name recognition of a player like Kessie, who represented clubs such as Barcelona and AC Milan before arriving at Al Ahli, that is simply because Spertsyan’s professional career has taken place entirely in Russia, which has been cut off from continental European football during the past decade.

It’s not determined by a lack of pedigree.

A number of clubs were linked to Spertsyan across the past few years, including Barcelona, Leeds United, Ajax and Marseille. But, while wanting a new challenge, he decided to stay loyal to Krasnodar until he helped deliver them silverware.

“Looking back, we definitely made the right decision last year for me to stay one more season,” Spertsyan said in an interview last year. “I said it a year ago and I’ll say it again - you have to win something and then leave. Becoming a champion with Krasnodar is a huge joy.

“I’ve been at the academy since I was a kid - you could say the club grew with me, and I grew with the club. I’ve witnessed the whole story of the club from the inside.”

Most importantly, more than any name recognition, Spertsyan has the right profile and that is what Al Ahli need if they are to take that final step to really challenge for the RSL title this season.

What Spertsyan brings, clearly, is another avenue to goals which was sorely needed last season in Matthias Jaissle’s side, who relied heavily on Ivan Toney to put the ball into the net.

While the English international did plenty of that - his 32 goals ranked behind only Al Qadsiah’s Julian Quinones in the top-scorer charts - the bare facts remain that Al Ahli scored the fewest RSL goals of any of the top four sides.

Indeed, their tally of 71 were 20 shy of champions Al Nassr (91) but also short of both Al Hilal (85) and Al Qadsiah (83).

While Toney netted those 32 times, the next best at Al Ahli was Feras Al Buraikan, with only five. That meant that, throughout the whole of the 2025-26 RSL, no player scored a higher percentage of their team’s overall goals than Toney, at 45 percent.

For as impressive as Al Ahli’s attacking talent was, with Mahrez, Galeno and Enzo Millot, they just didn’t have another reliable avenue for putting the ball in the net.

That’s where Spertsyan comes in.

Not only does he provide the creativity to create goals, but he supplies a cutting edge to score them, too. And that just might be the missing puzzle piece that Al Ahli have been looking for.