We continue to introduce the individual awards presented by the League at the end of each season.
As a reminder, each award is named in honour of a prominent figure in Kazakhstan football. The award for the Best Defender of the Season bears the name of Yevgeny Yarovenko.
Yevgeny Yarovenko is a Soviet and Kazakhstani footballer, as well as an expert analyst and ambassador for Freedom QJ League.
An Olympic champion and Honoured Master of Sports of the USSR, he was named Kazakhstan’s most outstanding footballer of the previous 50 years as part of UEFA’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
At the age of 17, he joined Fosforit, and in 1981 became a player for the region’s leading club, Khimik from Dzhambul.
Two years later, Yevgeny Yarovenko was invited to join Almaty-based Kairat. The young footballer made his Soviet Top League debut against Dynamo Kyiv. He quickly established himself in the starting lineup and became team captain in 1986. That same year, he received a call-up to the USSR Olympic team.
In 1988, he travelled to the Seoul Olympics, where the Soviet team won the gold medal. In the final against Brazil, Yarovenko played against Romário. He remains the only Olympic champion to have emerged from Kazakhstan’s football system.
A year later, he moved to Dnipro, where he won the USSR Cup and finished as a silver medallist in the Soviet championship.
Today, Yevgeny Yarovenko works in Freedom QJ League’s sports analytics unit, helping young Kazakhstani players fulfil their potential and promoting the League as an ambassador.
Yevgeny Yarovenko Award winners by year:
2023 – Ruslan Zakharov (Zhas Kyran);
2024 – Amirbek Bazarbayev (Kairat);
2025 – Akezhan Kalikulov (Kairat).
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