Persian Islamic mystics dubbed Derbent in Dagestan "the furthest part of the world; an end point". Fringed by mountains which are often only accessible by helicopter and, on one side, the Caspian Sea, it is an outpost situated awkwardly between the Eurasian Steppes and an outer gateway to the Middle East notable largely for being the birthplace of Suleyman Kerimov.

The slim, slightly balding 47-year-old Russian billionaire owner of Anzhi Makhachkala – a club based around 75 miles down the road from Derbent – is often photographed sporting designer stubble, expensive sunglasses and a vaguely bemused, at second glance totally inscrutable, expression of the sort patented by Roman Abramovich.

The difference between Kerimov and Chelsea's owner is that only two years in to his project to transform the North Caucasus into a new hub of world football, the former became bored with the idea last summer. Unfortunately this change of heart coincided with a blip in his business fortunes and the upshot is that Anzhi are bottom of Russia's Premier League, without a win all season.

They travel to Tottenham Hotspur on Europa League duty as very much a poor man's version of the rising force which, during the past two seasons, promised so much under Guus Hiddink's stewardship.

Another veteran occupies the manager's chair these days but Gadzhi Gadzhiyev, a 68-year-old one-time assistant coach of the old USSR team, has a rather less glittering CV than Hiddink. With a similar downsizing exercise having taken place among a playing staff which once featured the likes of Roberto Carlos, Samuel Eto'o and Lassana Diarra, Anzhi – only founded in 1991 – are well back down the road to anonymity.

With no domestic title – let alone European trophy – to show for his near £300m player investment, Kerimov slashed the budget by two-thirds last August while culling the highest earners.

Eto'o, the £23.7m striker he had made the world's best paid player on £350,000 a week, headed to Chelsea along with another talented forward, the £30.8m Willian.

Considering a further £15.8m had been invested on Lacina Traoré, £13.2m on Yuri Zhirkov and £12.3m on Christopher Samba, Kerimov expected much more than last season's third-place domestic finish allied to a Europa League second knockout round defeat to Newcastle United. When he purchased his three private planes and two yachts a certain status was assured, but Anzhi's owner was learning that it takes more than money alone to secure a place at football's top table.

By the time Hiddink resigned in July, Kerimov was already scaling back appreciably but his disillusionment grew when he felt impelled to sack the replacement manager, Rene Meulensteen, the former Manchester United coach now in charge of Fulham, after only 16 days. Meulensteen's crime? One theory is he allowed a long-running dispute involving Eto'o and Igor Denisov, Russia's notoriously bolshy captain, to fester.

Utterly disillusioned, Kerimov instigated a fire sale, reducing the annual wage bill from £116m to £40m as Eto'o and Willian led a procession of high-profile departures. Traoré, reportedly interesting Liverpool, remains at Anzhi but Zhirkov, Samba and Denisov have all, like the influential winger Balazs Dzsudzsak before them, decamped to Dynamo Moscow.

The owner's mind had been concentrated by his company, Uralkali, having £5.5bn wiped off its stock market valuation after severing a trade agreement with a business partner in Belarus. This break-up destroyed a price-fixing cartel which had ensured that the production of potash – used to make fertiliser – was an extremely lucrative trade.

Even for someone ranked 118th in the Forbes list of billionaires it represented quite a hit, but Uralkali's fortunes have subsequently recovered and the overriding feeling in Dagestan is that the cooling of Kerimov's football interest was far from solely informed by temporary commercial misfortune. Certainly the days when he gave Roberto Carlos, then Anzhi's marquee signing, a £1.2m, 250mph Bugatti Veyron for his 38th birthday are long gone.

Carlos and co were effectively mercenaries with no real connection to Anzhi, let alone the Republic of Dagestan. Tellingly, the stadium is a three-hour flight from the luxury apartments in Moscow where the team's higher-profile players are domiciled for their own safety.

A combination of Islamic insurgency in Dagestan – the militant group Shariat Jamaat is active in a republic experiencing significant tensions between Salafist groups urging the implementation of Sharia law and more traditional Sufi moderates – and lawless criminal gangs have conspired to make it one of Russia's most dangerous areas.

With the sound of not so distant gunfire sometimes serving as the soundtrack to Anzhi's home fixtures, it is no surprise Europa League games tend to be played in Moscow's more civilised surrounds.

The amalgam of riches from oil, natural gas and minerals, along with a position along a geopolitical fault-line adjacent to Chechnya, have made this ethnically diverse, intensely tribal area a magnet for not only Islamic extremists but also organised-crime barons and warlords. Footballers eager to help a Russian provincial club challenge the Moscow elite are likely to find Zenit St Petersburg a more appealing prospect.

Not that this cautionary tale is purely a case of "location, location". Kerimov offers designer-stubbled proof that rich Russian oligarchs can be fickle. Prone to boredom if things fail to go their way, football sugar daddies are not always entirely reliable.