Dinamo Moscow

That tells you where the club's centre of gravity sits. The years around him are the ones the club still counts.

The club had been formed on 18 April 1923, and it did not wait long to matter. Then came the war, and then 1945, when the championship went to Moscow again.

Eleven Soviet league titles in all. That gap — half a century and counting since a league title — is the number that hangs over everything else here. The six Soviet cups ran a little later, to 1984, and there was a Soviet super cup in 1977.

Since the Soviet league gave way to the Russian one, the record has thinned to a single line: the Russian Cup of 1995. Nothing has been added to it in the three decades since.

The ground has changed shape around all this. The VTB Arena, built on the site of the old Central Dinamo Stadium, holds 25,716 — a modest capacity for a club whose honours were won in front of far larger crowds, and one that fits inside a broader complex rather than standing alone. The white and blue of the shirts has outlasted the country the early trophies were won in.

What Dinamo have not done is win the Russian championship. They played every season of the Soviet top flight without relegation, a distinction the club still cites, but the trophy that would connect the Yashin years to the present has not come, and each season that passes puts more distance between the two.