Köpetdag Aşgabat

The team that plays under the Köpetdag name today grew out of the railway workers' side set up in Ashgabat in 1947. Lokomotiv first, then Spartak, then Kolhozçy, then Stroitel through the 1960s and early 1970s. Köpetdag for two seasons at the start of the 1960s, and then permanently from 1988.

It won the first four championships of Turkmenistan in a row, from 1992 to 1995, and took the title twice more before the decade turned.

The late 1990s brought in players from across the former union — Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians and Georgians arriving in Ashgabat for a league only a few years old. Valeriý Broşin and Valeriý Masalitin were the best known of them.

Then it stopped. Money ran out and the club was dissolved in 2008. It stayed gone for seven years and was reconstituted in 2015 around the team of the Turkmen interior ministry — a second founding as much as a revival. Saýid Seýidow took charge of that project and stayed until 2019, long enough to deliver the Turkmenistan Cup in 2018, the club's first trophy since 2001.

The home ground carries the same name, with room for 26,503.

Since the cup win the club has come up short in the matches that decide things: beaten in the Turkmenistan Super Cup final in 2019 and again in 2021, both times by Altyn Asyr, both times 0-2. Getting past that opponent is the immediate problem.