USSR women's football team enters official international play in 1990

In 1990 the Soviet Union's women's national football team began playing official international matches, a late start compared with many European countries. Women's football had long been marginal in the USSR, with little organised competition and almost no state funding, and the national side only took shape in the closing years of the Soviet era.

The team was coached by Oleg Lapshin, a veteran football specialist who took charge at the end of the 1980s. His task was to build a squad from a small pool of club players and prepare it for the first international fixtures against other European sides.

The programme was short-lived. The Soviet Union broke apart in late 1991, and with it the national team ceased to exist in its original form. Football in the successor states, including Russia, had to start again, and Russia formed its own women's national team in the early 1990s.

The period mattered because it laid the groundwork for Russian women's football. Lapshin's work with the Soviet side later became part of the background to his career, which his obituaries now recall.