Qarabağ FK

Meetings with Neftçi Baku are billed as the Baku derby, the fixture that settles bragging rights in the capital. The tag sits oddly on Qarabağ, a club with no roots in Baku at all.

It was formed in 1951 in Agdam, in Nagorno-Karabakh, under the name Məhsul, and passed through Şəfəq in 1977 and Kooperator in the 1980s before settling on Qarabağ in 1987. In 1993, with Agdam occupied during the First Karabakh War, the club had nowhere left to play and relocated to Baku. That same year, in the middle of the move, it took the league and cup double, a result later recognised with the Azerbaijan Super Cup.

Azersun has backed the club since 2001, and for its first three years under that sponsorship the team played as Qarabağ-Azersun. Domestically the table has rarely gone against it since the relocation: twelve league titles and eight cups line the shelf. Europe followed later and kept extending: a first Europa League group stage in 2014-15, then in 2017-18 the first Champions League group stage reached by an Azerbaijani side, and in 2023-24 the first run by a club from the country into the last 16 of a European competition.

Home games are played at Azersun Arena, a low-key ground in Bakı's Surakhany district holding around 4,700; for the bigger European nights the club moves to the larger Tofiq Bahramov Stadium or the Baku Olympic Stadium. The horse on the crest gave the team its nickname, the Horsemen, and its colours settled on black at home, white away.

Agdam, where it all started, has not hosted one of the club's matches since that move in 1993.