Khatlon

Khatlon have won the Tajik title three times, in 1997, 2005 and 2009, and the first of those came in the same decade the country's league itself was still finding its feet after independence. A domestic cup followed in 1997 and again in 2003, and the club had already done the same work once before, under different colours: as champions of the Tajik SSR in 1961 and 1985, and cup winners in 1965.

The names changed more than the results did. Founded in 1960 in what was then Kurgan-Tyube, the club played as Pakhtakor through the late 1960s and into the 1980s, then spent over three decades as Vakhsh. The Cotton Pickers nickname stuck through all of it, a leftover from the region's Soviet-era identity as cotton country. In February 2018, with the club in financial trouble, the local Bokhtar government took it over and renamed it Khatlon, after the surrounding province — the city itself had been renamed from Kurgan-Tyube to Bokhtar the year before. That arrangement did not last either: in January 2024 the club reverted to Vakhsh.

Ураз Туракулов held the bench through most of the good years, from 1994 into 2007 or 2008, long enough to be the answer whenever anyone asks who built this. The club still plays at the Pakhtakor stadium in Bokhtar, holding somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 depending on who is counting, in the yellow and white it has kept regardless of what the shirt says above the badge. A League Cup arrived in 2022, and a cup final was lost in 2020, but the Tajik Super Cup has never been won, and under the Vakhsh name again, the club is still chasing the kind of season that last came around in 2009.