Rotor Volgograd

The club has spent most of its life climbing back rather than staying up. It reached the top flight from the Soviet First League by winning it in 1991, dropped out of professional football entirely in the mid-2000s, and clawed back through the Second Division South zone twice, in 2011/12 and 2016/17, before topping the second-tier table again in 2019/20 to return to the Russian Premier League.

Before any of that it was a factory team. Rotor was founded in 1929 as the side of the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, and the name changed with the decade — Traktor for much of the Soviet era, Torpedo through the 1950s, Stal, Barrikady — before Rotor was settled on in 1975 and kept, with a brief gap in the mid-2000s when the club dropped down and played as Rotor-2.

Matches against Sokol Saratov and Volgar Astrakhan are billed locally as a Volga derby, all three clubs sitting on the same river. The academy has sent out more than 200 professional players, Yevgeni Savin and Alexander Sapeta among them, and the team now plays at the Volgograd Arena, 45,000 seats.