Lokomotiv Tbilisi

The club's home ground carries the name of a player who barely wore its colours. Mikheil Meskhi, the winger who won the European Championship with the Soviet Union in 1960, spent almost his entire career at Dinamo Tbilisi, the club Lokomotiv has spent nine decades chasing. He turned out for Lokomotiv for a single season, 1970, late in his career — yet the stadium built on the site now bears his name, and Lokomotiv plays its home matches on the smaller adjoining pitch, Meskhi 2, which holds 2,500.

The club was formed in 1936 as the football section of the Locomotive sports society, the railway workers' association that gave it its name and its red-and-white colours. It followed the Soviet-era reorganisations that reshaped many works clubs, appearing as MTsOP-Lokomotiv in 1988 and simply MTsOP the following year, before reverting to Lokomotiv in 1996.

Its strongest spell predates Georgian independence: three Georgian SSR titles, in 1937, 1945 and 1956, and the republic's cup in the latter two years. Since 1990 the club has never won the national championship, though it came closest either side of the millennium, finishing runner-up in the Erovnuli Liga in 2000/01 and 2001/02 and lifting the Georgian Cup three times in that stretch, with Kakhaber Tskhadadze, the country's first national-team captain, coaching from the bench.

Against Dinamo, the record is one-sided: 36 wins to 6 from 53 derbies. Lokomotiv dropped out of the top flight in 2022 and has not returned; a seventh-place finish in 2025 sent it down again, into Liga 3, where it starts the 2026 season.