2Drots

Two friends filming FIFA challenge videos with kids from Moscow academies is not the usual origin story for a football club, but that is where 2Drots started. Evgeny Babenko and Nikita Panasyuk registered a YouTube channel on 29 June 2016 and built an audience around it before the on-pitch side existed at all; the team itself only took shape in 2018. The name is the joke that stuck — "two nerds," a nod to the video game that got the whole thing going.

2Drots has no licence to play in the Russian professional pyramid, so its football happens elsewhere: the Media Football League, the Russian Cup, and a run of games. It won both season one and season two of the MFL in 2022, then took the Kazakhstan edition of the league in 2023 on penalties against Fight Nights. Not every final has gone its way — Amkal beat 2Drots 2:0 in the 2021 cup decider, and Broke Boys have twice denied it a title since.

The club has never had a home ground of its own. Its matches move between venues depending on the competition — CosmosArena in Moscow, Trudovye Rezervy in Kazan, Mordovia Arena in Saransk — though databases still list it against Arena Khimki, which seats 18,636.