Dinamo Moskva II

Khimki, in the Novogorsk district on the northern edge of the Moscow region, is where Dynamo Moscow keeps its training base. It is here, on a mini-arena built into the training complex rather than anything resembling a city stadium, that Dynamo Moscow II plays its home matches.

The side exists to send players up the ladder, and its own record has followed the parent club's fortunes more closely than any city's. A reserve squad known as Dynamo-d first appeared in 1992 and was renamed Dynamo-2 in 1998. The project was effectively rebuilt in 2016, after the first team dropped out of the Russian Premier League, and re-entered the third tier again in 2020. A separate, unrelated club had already carried the Dynamo-2 name once before, between 1986 and 1997.

It has never needed an identity apart from Dynamo's own: the same white shirts and blue shorts, the same nickname, White-Blues. Its honours board, though, runs deeper than the current farm side's short history. Six Soviet reserve championships were won in 1951, 1952, 1956, 1957, 1970 and 1988, and two more reserve titles followed in the Russian Premier League tournament of 2002 and 2003. The team also topped its Third League zone in 1996 and 1997 and won Division B of the Second League in 2024.

Opponents these days include Volgar Astrakhan, and occasionally Dynamo Moscow's own first team, a fixture few reserve sides get to play. The mini-arena at Novogorsk-Dynamo holds 790, and for all the Soviet-era silverware in the cabinet, the club has still to turn a development role into a fixed place among Russian football's professional tiers.