‘I used to play for Man City & now my pro-Russia party will make me president’

Former Manchester City striker Mikheil Kavelashvili will run for president of Georgia, his political party has announced.

The 53-year-old played for City from 1995 to 1997 and is best remembered for his goal on his debut against Manchester United in April 1996, a 3-2 defeat at Maine Road, weeks before the Alan Ball-managed team were relegated from the Premier League. Competition.

Kavelashvili scored twice more for City in the First Division as they finished 14th, but did not play enough games to renew his work permit. He was loaned to Swiss club Grasshoppers and left permanently the following summer.

He is the latest in a series of former football players seeking public office in Georgia. Former AC Milan defender Kakha Kaladze, who won the Champions League with the Italian giants in both 2003 and 2007, has been mayor of the capital Tbilisi since 2017, while former Schalke and Hertha Berlin defender Levan Kobiashvili sits in the Georgian parliament.

City, for whom compatriot Georgi Kinkladze had been a hit after signing in the summer of 1995, gambled on Kavelashvili to save them from collapse when he was signed from Dinamo Tbilisi on transfer deadline day.

Despite gaining seven points from their last three games, they were relegated on goal difference, having failed to recover from taking just two points from their first eleven.

The office of president in Georgia is largely ceremonial, although Kavelashvili's party – Georgian Dream – wields effective power by controlling parliament.

People's Power, a splinter group of the Georgian Dream party of which Kavelashvili is a co-founder, is seen as one of the most openly pro-Russian players in mainstream Georgian politics, and is in favor of the foreign agent and anti-LGBT laws .