LNZ Cherkasy

A season in the Ukrainian Premier League that ended with LNZ Cherkasy second in the table came five years after the club had been playing amateur football. The 2025/26 runners-up place is the highest finish in a climb that started well outside the professional game, and it followed a title in the amateur championship in 2020/21 and third place in the First League two seasons later, when promotion came through the play-offs rather than automatically.

The club did not begin in Cherkasy at all. It was set up in 2006 in the village of Lebedyn, in the Shpola district of the Cherkasy region, by Dmytro Kravchenko, who ran the Lebedyn seed plant. For its first decade and a half the team played regional football: champions of the Cherkasy region in 2009 and 2011, then again in 2016 and 2017, with the regional cup added in that second year.

Midway through the 2020 season the club moved to Cherkasy itself and took the shortened name it carries now. Home matches are played at the Cherkasy Arena, which holds 10,321.

Nobody at the club has settled on an official nickname. Supporters and the local press call the team the Violet, after the home shirts, worn with white.

Kravchenko is the figure the club is still identified with — the seed-plant director who founded a village side in 2006 and whose company name a Premier League runner-up now carries.