Dinamo Tbilisi

The pitch at Boris Paichadze Dinamo Arena sits below the surrounding hills, though for parts of the last two seasons the club has shifted home fixtures to the Mikheil Meskhi Stadium while the national side and European fixtures took priority at the main ground. It is the setting Dinamo Tbilisi have used since long before Georgia had a league of its own to win.

The club formed on 1 September 1925 under the Dinamo sports society, and its name has not always stayed put. In 1990, as Georgian clubs pulled out of the Soviet championship, the team renamed itself Iberia to put distance between itself and its Soviet-era identity. The change never took with supporters, and by 1992 the Dinamo name was back for good, with the Iberia seasons folded into the same unbroken history.

That history has its high point in 1981, when Dinamo beat Carl Zeiss Jena to win the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup. Vitali Daraselia scored the winning goal, and the match was notable for the performance of the squad.

Since Georgian independence, no club has matched Dinamo's record: 19 league titles, the most recent in 2022, alongside 13 Georgian Cups and seven Georgian Super Cups. The academy has kept producing players who move on to Europe's bigger leagues, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia to Napoli and Kaha Kaladze to a long career at Milan among them.