Metallurg Lipetsk

Lipetsk's steelworks needed a football team, and in 1945 the club that would become Metallurg took the field for the first time as Traktor. The name changed twice more before it stuck — Torpedo through the late 1940s and into the 1960s, then Metallurg in 1966, with a spell as Novolipetsk in the late 1970s that nodded to the plant backing the side. What survived every rename was the shirt: red and black.

The closest the club came to the top flight was 1997, finishing second in the First Division under Valery Tretyakov. Promotion went unrewarded that year — the league had changed its rules so only the winner moved up, and Metallurg stayed put. The Second Division became more familiar territory, won four times, including in 2008 under Soferbiy Yeshugov and again in the 2020/21 season, when the club returned to the second tier for the first time since 2009.

No fixture carries more weight than the meetings with Voronezh's Fakel, played out as the Chernozemye derby and known for boiling over among the fans, an August 2014 trip to Voronezh among the sharpest flashpoints. Sergei Mashnin ran the club through most of its recent history, taking charge in 2006 and again from 2010 to 2022 and once more in 2023.

Home games are played at the Central Stadium Metallurg, reduced to 11,000 seats after a 2018 rebuild that trimmed a capacity once closer to 15,000. It is the same ground, under whichever name the club wore, that hosted a team built for the men who worked the furnaces.