Kaisar

The second, in 2019, arrived under the Bulgarian coach Stoycho Mladenov, who was named the league's best manager that season.

Kyzylorda has never had another club wear this crest. Founded in 1968 as Volna, the side went through Avtomobilist, Orbita and Meliorator before Kaisar was adopted in 1990. What stayed constant through the renaming was the city itself, on the Syr Darya in the south of the country, far enough from the football centres of Almaty and Astana that the club's biggest rivalry runs along a compass line: matches against Kyzylzhar of Petropavl are read locally as South against North.

Between cup runs, Kaisar's business has mostly been won in the First League, the second tier, which the club has topped four times — 1995, 2005, 2013 and 2016 — each promotion a return ticket to the top flight rather than a first arrival there. Sergei Kogai belongs to an earlier chapter: in 1992 he scored 22 goals in a single season, still the club's individual scoring record, and later returned to manage the team he had once carried on his own.

The 2019 cup win also sent Kaisar into the Kazakhstan Super Cup the following year, where Astana beat them 0:1. Home games moved in 2025 from the Gani Muratbayev Stadium, which held around 7,000, to the newly built Kaisar Arena — 11,000 seats, the largest the club has played in front of in Kyzylorda.