Avangard Kursk

Promotion in 2016/17, won at the top of the Centre zone, was not the club's first taste of the second tier — Avangard had already spent 2005 to 2007 there before dropping back down. What followed was different. A Cup of FNL followed in 2019.

That same winter, the club came close to folding altogether. Multi-million debts and a lack of funding put its future in doubt in January 2019, and it took the intervention of Kursk region governor Roman Starovoyt, along with backing from Metalloinvest, to keep it running. The relief was temporary: in May 2020, with the pandemic cutting into budgets across the league, Avangard chose to withdraw from the FNL rather than run up debt it could not repay, and returned to the PFL.

Home games are played at Trudovye Rezervy, which holds 11,329.