Naftan

Aleksandr Degtsyaryov scored twice in Ghent in the summer of 2009, in the first European tie the club from Novopolotsk had ever played. The Belarus Cup won a few months earlier had opened that door, and the same season brought fourth place in the top flight — the highest the club has finished.

The team grew out of the oil refinery that built Novopolotsk, and the shifting names on the shirt track the changing hands it passed through: Neftyanik from 1963, then Dvina, then Kommunalnik, before Naftan came back in 1992. A sponsor's name hung on the end of it for six years in the 1990s. Since 2023, as a state institution, it has been FC Naftan-Novopolotsk.

Valery Stripeikis is the figure the older supporters go back to. He scored 85 goals in 213 games for the club, more than anyone else, and twice finished as the leading scorer in the Belarusian top division, in 1998 and again in 2004. Vitaly Gamanovich played more matches than any of them — 245 — and sits second on the scoring list.

The second Belarus Cup arrived in 2012 and carried the club back into the Europa League. Between those two cups and after them the league position slid; Naftan won the First League in 2022, having also won it in 1995, which says plainly enough where the club has spent much of the past decade.

Home is the Atlant, a modest ground in a town built around a refinery, and the yellow and blue that gives the side its other name. The official nickname is Severyane — the northerners.

Capacity at the Atlant: 4,522.