Hirnyk

The mine named after Karl Liebknecht put a team together in Kryvyi Rih in 1925. That connection never loosened. When the club was rebuilt as a legal entity in 1998 it carried the name Rodyna for a few seasons, then settled on Hirnyk — the miner — in the early 2000s.

The industry shaped the fixture list too. In 1999 the club won the championship of Ukraine among the enterprises of the Ukrrudprom concern, and in 2002 and 2003 it took the CIS Cup for teams from the mining industry twice running. Those are not trophies that appear in national record books, but they say plainly what kind of football club this was.

The regional years came in the same stretch — champions of Kryvyi Rih in 1999, then of Dnipropetrovsk region in 2001 and 2002, and third in the Ukrainian amateur championship in 2003. From there the climb into the professional game was slow. Fourth place in the Second League in 2013/14 sent them up, and 2015/16 brought sixth in the First League, which remains the highest the club reached.

In August 2020 the professional side was reorganised and renamed Kryvbas, taking the club's place in the Professional Football League with it. The name Hirnyk stayed with the under-19s for a time.