The Russian Football League regularly finishes between sixth and eighth place in the UEFA club rankings — a good indication of the performance of the Russian Premier League. It means that Russia has an automatic spot in the UEFA Champions League and can launch several clubs into the Europa League. Make your bets on the Europa League — a competition officially sponsored by bwin.

With new stadiums built recently in 2018 for the UEFA World Cup, Russia's Premier League has quickly gained momentum, promising some of the most exciting matches the country has to offer. Nearly every Premier League club now has a state-of-the-art arena that can accommodate a reasonable number of spectators and is ranked in the top UEFA category.

For the past few seasons, the Russian Premier League is played in an "autumn-spring" calendar together with the European leagues, from July to May.

Due to the harsh winter, the season is interrupted between mid-December and the end of February. Make your sports bets on our online betting platform.

A handful of teams dominate the Russian Championship

For several seasons now, Zenit St. Petersburg has been winning the league title. There have been four different winners since 2005, with CSKA Moscow and Zenit St. Petersburg sharing the majority of these championships.

Long-term betting on who will win the league is popular, with only a small handful of teams considered to be true title contenders each season.

The seasons are regularly marked by numerous Moscow derbies, and this season, there are 4 Moscow-based teams: Spartak, Lokomotiv, Dynamo, and CSKA.

You can watch a Russian Premier League match every Friday. The timings for weekend matches are 2 pm, 4:30 pm, and 7 pm, for evening kick-offs,

Recommended Russian Premier League Betting

The league consists of only 16 teams. The last two teams of the season get relegated to the second division (the FNL), while the thirteenth and the fourteenth placed teams take part in a relegation playoff. Therefore, four teams — one quarter of the total teams — face the possibility of relegation at the end of the season. Make your football bets with bwin.

It means that matches are often very competitive, with teams fighting to stay in the elite league.

Being a fairly tactical league, the score is 0-0 at halftime in one-third of the league games, while the most common score at the final whistle is 1-1.