Aktobe Jas

There is no youth side turning out in Aktobe Jas colours today. The club shut down for good in 2019, and its last placing in the Kazakhstan First League — 14th, bottom of the table — closed a story that had already stopped and started once before.

Founded in 2003 as the reserve arm of FC Aktobe, the side existed to funnel young players toward the first team and spent the following years in the First League, its best finishes a fourth place in 2007 and sixth the year after. It was disbanded in 2012, when the club's board redirected the funding into youth football lower down the pyramid. Six years later, in 2018, Aktobe Jas was brought back for the same purpose — building up local talent — only for FC Aktobe's own relegation and a restructuring of the club soon after to end the experiment a second and final time.

The reserve side played its home matches at the regional youth sports school's Stadium No. 8, which holds 3,000. It never had a website of its own, running instead off the main club's pages, and it went without a single trophy across its spells in the league. Its final season is remembered less for the football than for what followed it: players from Aktobe Jas and its sister side Aktobe-M were named that autumn in a match-fixing investigation.

Anton Shurygin is the name the club is remembered for producing — a forward who worked his way out of Aktobe Jas and into FC Aktobe's first team, the kind of step up the reserve side was built to make possible.