Fabio Capello is expected to be formally confirmed as manager of Russia in the next 24 hours. Barring a last-minute hitch, he will sign a two-year contract worth around €10m a year including bonuses with an option for two more years after that. Nikita Simonyan, the vice-president of the Russian Football Union who will sign the contract, confirmed this week that Capello will be appointed but a few details remain to be resolved.

As with England, Capello will largely use Italian assistants, although with Franco Baldini now the general manager of Roma it seems unlikely he will play such a central role, with one local coach to act as liaison. It seems probable that Andrei Talalaev, the 39-year-old former Tom Tomsk forward, who played one year in Italy with Treviso, and has worked as an assistant at Spartak Moscow and Rostov, will take the Stuart Pearce role. Capello's salary will be met by the billionaires Suleiman Kerimov, owner of Anzhi Makhachkala, and Leonid Fedun, the mulleted owner of Spartak Moscow.

Capello's task is obvious but twofold. The gains of 2008 and that semi-final at the Euros are already being lost; a third successive failure to qualify for the World Cup would in effect destroy any claims Russia may have to be among the top rank of football nations – and the embarrassment would be confounded by the fact they are hosting the tournament in 2018. There is an odd sense that they must prove themselves worthy of that tournament, that they must show that they are not merely another Qatar, in effect buying a tournament by dint of oil revenues.

At the same time, there is an argument that Russia may be as well to write off 2014 and look to build a young side that will be peaking by 2018 when, on home soil, there is a greater possibility of perhaps winning the tournament. There is a need to balance the two goals of qualification and development and that will not be easy in a group containing Portugal, Israel, Northern Ireland, Azerbaijan and Luxembourg.

They should finish in the top two but second place would guarantee only a playoff and, as Russia know all too well from their defeat to Slovenia on away goals in the qualifiers for 2010, a two-legged knock-out tie is fraught with risk, whoever the opponent.

"I am very excited," Capello was quoted as saying on Tuesday. "We can do a lot and we have much to do. For me it is a great challenge and, of course, the main goal is to qualify for the World Cup. Two of us will qualify, but, like in all the qualification stages, it will be very, very hard. But I am confident that we will qualify."

This is an ageing Russia side. The team that started Russia's opening game at Euro 2012 featured eight players who had been in the squad for 2008. Of the other three, Aleksandr Kerzhakov had been in the squad only to be dropped as his form collapsed at Sevilla and Igor Denisov declined selection. The only real new blood in the 2012 side was Alan Dzagoev. Of the 20 outfielders in the Euro 2012 squad, 14 will be aged 30 or over by the time of the Brazil World Cup. The other six were the defenders Vladimir Granat and Kirill Nababkin, the midfielders Dmitri Kombarov and Denis Glushakov and the forwards Aleksandr Kokorin and Dzagoev. Dzagoev aside, the other five have only 21 caps between them. This is a team that has grown old together.

"Everyone saw Russia at the Euro," Capello said . "A big problem is that in the teams of the Russian league there are seven foreigners and only four selectable [Russian players]. It is very hard to work in this way."

Although he was criticised for not culling the England team after the 2010 World Cup, Capello actually proved adept at integrating younger players into the team in the 18 months that followed. He will, presumably, look to do something similar with Russia but it is a difficult process, particularly when his knowledge of the Russian league is presumably significantly less than his knowledge of English players after two years in the job.

At least he'll be used to thrusting his jaw dismissively at those doubting the wisdom of appointing a foreigner. Capello will be the third straight non-Russian coach in charge of the national side but he is in a sense more foreign than either of his predecessors, Guus Hiddink and Dick Advocaat: there have been strong stylistic links between Russian and Dutch football since the 60s; the Italian game could hardly be more different. Capello has always been a tactical pragmatist, adjusting to circumstance, even playing with a back three in his time at Roma, but it's hard to imagine him ever adapting to the "clap-clap", rapid-passing style that harks back to passovotchka and has its parallels in ice-hockey.

"I can't see any benefit in appointing another foreigner," the former Spartak forward Valery Rheingold told rusfootball.info. "In general, everything that's happened in recent years confirms that we are a very careless football country. We don't learn from our mistakes because we don't draw any conclusions from them."

The attacks on foreign coaches because they're foreign are common enough – and Capello will have heard most of them before. A more serious question about his suitability for the role came from the Sport Express columnist Dmitry Simonov. "Capello has succeeded with stellar teams like Milan, Real, Roma and England," he said. "Capello has not worked before with, let's face it, mediocre material. Each coach has a specialisation: some build teams of gold, some of bricks and some, I'm sorry, of horse shit. I'm not sure that an elite chef who prepares perfect mussels and foie gras sauce will boil the water for half-rotten potatoes better than any canteen cook."

Simonov may be a little kind to England and a little harsh on Russia but the general point is sound. Does Capello understand the Russian mentality? Can he really source and develop young talent? Given Capello will be 68 by the time of the World Cup, is there not a danger that the next two years will be wasted on, to use Simonov's phrase, "an old man's obstinacy and caprice" rather than in building for 2018?

And then there is Capello's motivation. Does anybody believe it is anything other than the salary that is drawing him to Moscow? With England, back at the beginning of his reign when he could still be bothered with pandering to local opinion, he spoke of his love for English football and his desire in his final job to achieve what nobody had done in years and nearly win something with the mother of football.

He may well be interested in the iconostasis in Yaroslavl, the architecture of St Petersburg and the treasures of the Kremlin – he is, after all, an extremely cultured man – but it takes chutzpah of Robbie Keane proportions to claim a long-standing desire to take Russian football to the heights it deserves. And given Russia have very little chance of winning the 2014 World Cup (less even than England had of winning in 2010), what can he be hoping for? Would a last-16 place in Brazil really give him any great sense of satisfaction? It's hard to avoid the sense that he sees this as a well-paid sinecure: if things go well he can lap up the praise; if they go badly, he can retreat to Italy with a large pay-off.

The long term really isn't his concern; for Russia, though, with a World Cup to be hosted in six years, it has never been more important.