Sardor Tursunzoda

When TALCO built a new club in Tursunzoda in 2022, the city already had a football institution — Regar-TadAZ, home of the aluminium plant's decorated old guard. Sardor grew up alongside it rather than out of it, a separate outfit sharing a home city and, eventually, a home ground with the club it would come to measure itself against.

That ground is TALCO Arena, a 13,770-seat venue that carried the name Metallurg until 2017. Sardor plays in red and white.

The 2026 season put the club in the Higher League for the first time, promoted alongside Parvoz after working its way up from the First League. It has been a hard introduction: through 14 rounds Sardor sat 11th of 12 with two wins, four draws and eight defeats, in the relegation play-off zone. The team went further in the Cup, beating Istaravshan in the quarter-finals — losing the away leg 2-1 before turning it round to win the tie 3-2 on aggregate — and reaching the semi-final.

Rustam Khodjaev took over as head coach going into the top-flight campaign. He played 15 times for Tajikistan's national side, scoring four goals, and was named the league's best coach in 2013 before moving into coaching staff roles with the national team and its youth side. He replaced Makhmadjon Habibulloev, the man who had actually taken Sardor up — a former Tajikistan national coach and a champion many times over as a player with Regar-TadAZ — who lost his job for lacking a Pro licence.

The derby with Regar-TadAZ is the fixture that matters locally, two clubs from the same city with no shared trophy history between them. They met in June, Regar-TadAZ winning 1-0, a reminder of the gap that still separates the two: Regar-TadAZ carries a run of national championships and cups, while Sardor, four years into existence, has yet to win anything at all.