Torpedo Moscow

Torpedo were Soviet champions three times — 1960, 1965 and 1976 — and collected six Soviet Cups between 1949 and 1986. In 1993, with the Soviet Union gone and Russian football starting again from nothing, the factory club took the first Russian Cup, a trophy that read almost like a fresh start.

The real start was plainer: in August 1924 workers at the AMO car plant put together a team called RDPK. The name shifted as the factory did — AMO, then ZiS, then Torpedo from 1936 — but the shopfloor never let go of the club. Supporters still call the players Avtozavodtsy, the factory men, a name older and more used than the black-and-white shirts.

Eduard Streltsov gave Torpedo its face, and the home ground has carried his name ever since; Viktor Shustikov played more matches for the club than anyone who followed him, and Valentin Ivanov, Valery Voronin, Gennady Gusarov and Alexander Ponomarev belong to the same run of years. The Streltsov Stadium held 13,450 before it closed for rebuilding in 2019, with 15,000 seats promised once the work finishes in autumn 2026. Until then Torpedo have been playing out of Arena Khimki, licensed for 14,950.

The line since the 1990s has rarely run straight. A sale to Luzhniki changed the name and the shirt in 1996; relegation from the top flight followed in 2006; by 2009 the club had lost its professional status altogether and dropped into the amateur game. Torpedo climbed back, fell again, and returned to the Premier League in 2022 — only to be thrown out of it in July 2025, after a referee-bribery scandal reached the club.

Across the city, Lokomotiv have been the opponent that matters since 1938, a derby that has passed its hundredth meeting, with the older rivalry against Spartak still sitting in the background.