Former Manchester City striker Mikheil Kavelashvili is to stand for election to be president of Georgia, his political party has announced.
The 53-year-old played for City from 1995 to 1997 and is best remembered for scoring on his debut against Manchester United in April 1996, a 3-2 defeat at Maine Road weeks before the team managed by Alan Ball were relegated from the Premier League.
Kavelashvili went on to score twice more for City in the First Division as they finished 14th but did not play enough games for his work permit to be renewed. He was loaned to Swiss club Grasshoppers and left permanently the following summer.
He is the latest in a line of former footballers to seek 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 served as mayor of the capital Tbilisi since 2017, whilst former Schalke and Hertha Berlin defender Levan Kobiashvili sits in the Georgian parliament.
City, for whom fellow Georgia international Georgi Kinkladze had been a hit after signing in the summer of 1995, gambled on Kavelashvili to save them from the drop when he was brought in from Dinamo Tbilisi on transfer deadline day.
Despite taking seven points from their final three games they were relegated on goal difference, having failed to recover from taking only two points from their first 11.
The office of president is largely ceremonial in Georgia, though Kavelashvili’s party – Georgian Dream – wields effective power by controlling the parliament.
People's Power, a splinter group of the Georgian Dream party which Kavelashvili co-founded, is seen as among the most openly pro-Russian players in mainstream Georgian politics, and has championed the foreign agent and anti-LGBT laws.