Dynamo Kyiv

The Olimpiyskiy National Sports Complex holds 70,050 people, and on a European night that bowl in central Kyiv is where the club's biggest results have been made and lost. Dynamo also keeps a second home in reserve, the smaller Dynamo Stadium named after Valeriy Lobanovskyi, seating just under 17,000, used when the occasion calls for something closer to the old ground the club grew up on.

Dynamo Kyiv was founded on 13 May 1927, a date that still appears in FIFA and UEFA records as the club's official birth. Everything that followed took place under the same white and blue, colours that gave the team its nickname, the White-Blues, though older regulars still call them the Beavers or the Marmots.

Nobody else won the Soviet championship as often — thirteen titles, plus nine Soviet cups. When Ukraine got its own league, Dynamo simply carried on, taking the title seventeen times, most recently in 2024, and the Ukrainian Cup fourteen times. Twice the club reached beyond Soviet and Ukrainian football altogether, lifting the European Cup Winners' Cup in 1975 and 1986, and in between, the 1975 UEFA Super Cup.

Those European campaigns produced two Ballon d'Or winners in Oleg Blokhin and Igor Belanov. The academy later produced a third: Andriy Shevchenko came through the Dynamo system before his Ballon d'Or in 2004, won during his years at Milan. Oleksandr Shovkovskiy, Anatoliy Demyanenko and Yevhen Rudakov built their own reputations in the same shirt.

Across the country, Shakhtar Donetsk has long stood as the one rival that matters most, a fixture known simply as the Ukrainian Derby, or the Ukrainian Clasico.

All of it traces back to that ground in the capital, the stadium the club still calls home.