Irtysh Omsk

Irtysh sit in the Second League, Division A, the third tier of Russian football, with zonal titles in 2018/19 and again in 2019/20.

The club traces back to 9 June 1946, though the name on the shirt has changed more often than the ownership has: Krylia Sovetov at first, then a factory team, then Bolshevik, then Krasnaya Zvezda, before settling on Irtysh in 1958. It kept that name until 2005, spent a few years as Irtysh-1946, and went back to the original.

Red Star remains the ground, a stadium that once held 18,000 and now holds 4,655 after reconstruction stripped it down to something a third-tier crowd can actually fill. In winter the fixtures move into the indoor arena attached to it.

The Soviet-era Irtysh could compete: two Second League silver medals in the First League in 1992 and 1993 marked the closest the club came to the top flight in that period, and a Russian SFSR Cup sits in the cabinet from 1981.

Games against Sibir Novosibirsk carry the weight of a fixture people call the Siberian derby, the one date in the calendar that needs no other context.