The Kremlin has now fallen under the St Petersburg spell, just as easily as Wall Street. Next on the agenda? The City of Manchester Stadium on May 14. Anyone writing off Zenit St Petersburg as a side that got lucky should realise that the smart money around Europe is on Dick Advocaat’s team to win the Uefa Cup final.

Unheard of outside Russia until a few seasons ago, Zenit have been making up for lost time in a big way. Their biggest fan is Dmitry Medvedev, the man who was recently elected to succeed Vladimir Putin as Russian President and who will take office on Wednesday. Medvedev, the son of St Petersburg teachers, is hoping to put affairs of state to one side for 24 hours to travel to Manchester to watch the team whom he has helped to turn into a major player in European football.

The 42-year-old should have no problem getting a ticket. Before running for office, he stood down as chairman of Gazprom, the oil and gas company that has bankrolled Advocaat’s £50 million spending spree on new players. Gazprom is also funding Zenit’s new stadium and even though costs for the 65,000-seat arena – the club currently uses the modest Petrovsky Stadium with a capacity of just 21,000 – have doubled to around £300 million, Gazprom is not flinching about footing the bill.

Medvedev has a quadruple dream of his own to dwarf Walter Smith’s. The Russian President stated before leaving Gazprom, which he had helped to build into the third largest corporation in the world, that he wanted to quadruple its value to tip $1 trillion by 2017.

Ironically, that date will be the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The events that broke centuries of power and privilege unfolded in St Petersburg’s streets in October 1917 and spread across the great land that became the Soviet Union.

Zenit, a team known in its early days as Bolshevik, now symbolises Russia’s transformation from communist backwater to capitalist head-hunter. Russia’s extraordinary growth and explosion of wealth – funded by the oil money - started seeping down into its football several years ago. Gazprom hooked up with Zenit in 2006 and has given Advocaat every help he needs in building a team that stunned the traditional power of Moscow by being crowned Russian champions last November.

Advocaat has a squad that contains Czechs, Slovaks, two South Koreans, an Argentinian, a Ukrainian, a Dutchman (Fernando Ricksen, the former Rangers defender), a Turk and a Belgian. Nicolas Lombaerts, a 23-year-old defender, who was signed from Ghent, admits that the original lure was a substantial contract but the hidden benefit is the city itself. St Petersburg is home to six million people, but its historic buildings which have made it a Unesco World Heritage Site, soothed Lombaerts’ homesickness.

“It is just like a western city,” Lombaerts said. “I can get anything I want here. The food is also good and the architecture is wonderful. I was not sure about moving to Russia when I first got the offer to join Zenit but I came here to look at the city and was impressed. I know that it might have been tough to live in Russia ten years ago, and even now in some other cities, but St Petersburg is a great place to live. We are all very well paid by the club and that helps. The only thing I miss about Belgium is chips and mayonnaise.”

Gazprom’s immense resources are invested in Zenit through their sports director, the agent, Konstantin Sarsania. A player turned television pundit, he is an inevitably controversial figure. He is agent for the forward, Alexander Kerzhakov, who joined Seville in January 2007, raising all kinds of ethical issues about conflicts of interest.

The 24-year-old Pavel Pogrebnyak arrived from Tom Tomsk in 2006 and then Advocaat plundered the Argentinian striker, Alejandro Dominguez, from another Russian club, Rubin Kazan, for £4 million in December. Then there is Fatih Tekke, a 30-year-old Turkey international, who cost £7 million from Trabzonspor.

The best-known player to Scottish fans – apart from Ricksen, who is struggling to get a first-team place these days – is the Ukraine midfield player, Anatoliy Tymoschuk, who was linked with Celtic and a number of Barclays Premier League clubs. He cost £10 million from Shakhtar Donetsk – a fee far higher than Celtic were discussing – and such is the association of the club with their sponsor that it has been rumoured the fee was partly paid in gas, leading to an emphatic denial. “I hereby state that there is no gas element in the agreement for the transfer of Anatoliy Tymoshchuk to Zenit, nor was this even possible,” Serhiy Palkin, Shakhtar’s general director, insisted. “Shakhtar is a soccer club, not a gas broker.”

Zenit made minimal impact on the Moscow-dominated Soviet football scene. Their only title win came in 1984, which was scant reward for the partisan backing they receive as being the only club in Russia’s second-largest city. Advocaat’s influence, shaped by his time in Scotland, Holland and South Korea, has rapidly changed that picture. He recruited Kim Dong Jin, known to the Dutch coach from his time in South Korea, while Dominguez, a former River Plate winger, brings South American movement and trickery on the ball.

The importance of Gazprom to the club was underlined by the club spokesman, Alexej Blynow saying recently “without doubt, thanks to Gazprom we have outstanding possibilities”. Nor will Zenit be without any backing in Manchester. More than 12,000 fans have applied to the British Consulate in St Petersburg. The Russians are coming.

Fiorentina hit back at Smith’s tactics

Cesare Prandelli, the Fiorentina coach, yesterday bitterly criticised Rangers’ tactics and said they did not deserve to reach the Uefa Cup final. “We have to accept it,” he said after his side were knocked out on penalties. “It has been a beautiful night and it could have ended better for us. I have to thank my players, who kept on fighting until the end.

“A team that has renounced to play has won, football is like this. Football sometimes awards teams that don’t deserve it.”

The Italian club dominated the game and had a host of chances to win the tie in normal time, but they were unable to break the deadlock.

“This great adventure is over and we have to accept the result even if we surely deserved more,” he said. “We gave everything we had trying to score until the last minute of extra-time.

“I’m sure we deserved to reach the final. Rangers came here just to stop us playing our best football and got the result they wanted. I have nothing to say to my players.

“The game would have been more entertaining if we were facing a team ready to play a bit more. The lads have shown they have a great spirit and this bitterness will pass. We deserved to get to the final, in two games we lacked a bit of luck.” The Italian club’s president, Andrea Della Valle, was equally critical of Walter Smith’s side, saying: “Rangers played the whole match with the objective of going to penalties, and they succeeded.”

Fabio Liverani, the midfield player, who missed in the shoot-out, believes Fiorentina were destined to miss out on the final. “It’s been a cursed tie,” he said afterwards. “Throughout the match I believed that sooner or later the goal would come, but we didn't succeed. I’m personally disappointed to have missed the penalty. The crowd have been great though, I must thank them.”

Zenit top ten

—The club was established in 1925 under the name of Leningrad Metal Works. They did not take on the name of FC Zenit until 1940 and won their first major title, the USSR Cup, in 1944. They have also gone under the names Stalinets (1936-40); FC Zenit Leningrad (1940-1991); FC Zenit St Petersburg (1991present).

—Zenit will compete in the Champions League for the first time next season after they won the Russian Premier League.

—Zenit’s league triumph was just the second in their history and the first by a team from outside Moscow since 1995. Zenit’s only other league triumph came in 1984.

—Zenit is owned by Russia’s largest company, Gazprom, the biggest extractor of natural gas in the world. The company took a controlling stake in the club in December 2005.

—Dick Advocaat, the Zenit coach, was widely expected to take up a deal with Australia in November but changed his mind after the Russian team offered him a new contract to lead them for the remainder of their Uefa Cup campaign.

—One of Zenit’s most famous players, Oleg Salenko, spent six months at Rangers in 1995 after transferring from Valencia for £2.5 million. Salenko is best known as the only player to have scored five goals in a World Cup match – against Cameroon in 1994.

—St Petersburg was the scene of the October Revolution in Russia where the Bolsheviks captured the city’s Winter Palace as they overthrew the Russian Provisional Government. The revolution gave rise to the Russian Civil War (1917-1922), which heralded the creation of the Soviet Union.

—In 1967 Zenit finished bottom of the USSR League but were saved from relegation after it was decided it would be unwise to relegate a Leningrad team during the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. The league accommodated this decision by adding a 20th team to the competition for the next season.

—Zenit were relegated in the first year of the Russian Premier League in 1992.

—FC Zenit play their home matches at the Petrovsky Stadium, capacity 21,725, which is located on a small island in the Malaya Neva river. The stadium also hosted the Goodwill Games in 1994. They had played their home games at the Kirov Stadium until it was demolished last year to make way for a new stadium.