Lernayin Artsakh FC

Lernayin Artsakh enter the 2025/26 season in Armenia's Premier League, the division they reached in May 2022 with a 4-1 win over Gandzasar that clinched the First League title. The club is registered in Goris, yet its home fixtures are played at the Kasakhi Marzik Stadium in Ashtarak, which holds 3,600 — neither town is where the club was formed.

That place is Stepanakert, in Nagorno-Karabakh, where the club was founded in 1927 as Dinamo, renamed Karabakh in 1960 and Artsakh in 1989. Its original ground, the Stepanakert Republican Stadium, held up to 15,000. War kept the team off the pitch between 1992 and 1995, and it operated out of Yerevan until 2007 before returning to Stepanakert for a decade. From 2019, with UEFA declining to recognise a Nagorno-Karabakh registration, home matches shifted to Sisian, where the ground held 1,000, and later to Vayk. The evacuation of the Armenian population from Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023 split the club outright: part of the squad and staff stayed behind in Stepanakert while the licence carried on into Armenia.

The oldest title dates to 1977, when the side, then named Karabakh, won the Azerbaijan SSR championship under captain Karlen Simonyan, known locally as "Artsakh's Streltsov," who later moved into coaching. As Lernayin Artsakh, the club won two more championships, in 2009 and 2018, pairing the second with the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic Cup. Armenia internationals Poghos Galstyan and Tigran Yesayan both played for the club.

Gandzasar of Kapan remains the closest thing to a settled rival. The immediate task is plainer: stay in the Premier League while home matches are still being played nowhere near Stepanakert.