Fc Tosno

Zenit gave Tosno its name in the record books before either side had played a game that mattered to both — a Northern Derby fought first in the second tier, against Zenit's reserve side, and later, briefly, in the Russian Premier League itself, a fixture that had no business existing between a club from a town of 40,000 and the country's best-funded side.

Tosno grew out of an amateur outfit called Ruane, itself a 2009 merger with a team that had played the Leningrad Oblast championship since the 1990s under the names Era and Tosno. Registration as a professional club came on 13 June 2013, straight into the third tier, and the promotion followed within a year: PFL West champions in 2013/14, up to the second division.

What happened next took the town further than its stadium situation ever suggested it could go. Tosno had no ground of its own to speak of — home matches were played wherever one could be found, in Tikhvin, in Veliky Novgorod, eventually at Petrovsky Stadium in St Petersburg, a arena built for a club many times its size. Dmitry Parfyonov took charge in August 2015 and stayed three seasons, long enough to finish second in the second division in 2016/17 and take the club straight into the Premier League. Fourteen months later he had the cup as well: Tosno beat Avangard Kursk 2-1 in the Russian Cup final on 9 May 2018, Reziuan Mirzov scoring the winner, Pavel Pogrebnyak — signed that year specifically to help win it — among the scorers too.

It was the high point and the end. Tosno never played the following season; the club was dissolved after the 2017/18 campaign under financial collapse, the cup won on borrowed time from a bankruptcy already in motion. It returned in April 2023 in the regional leagues, well below where the derby with Zenit had once put it, rebuilding from the level it had started at a decade earlier.