Shirak II

The ground in Gyumri holds 4,500 and reopened after renovation work finished in 2019. It is the same pitch the senior side uses, and the reserve team plays there. The stadium is known to some as Shirak Stadium and to others by the city's name, which is roughly how the reserve side itself has been catalogued over the years.

Orange and black come from the tuff stone the city is built from. The nickname attached to the senior club, Black Panthers, travels down to the second team by habit rather than by any decision.

The team was formed in 1967 as Shirak-d Leninakan, nine years after the parent club, and it has changed its name more often than most clubs change managers. Aragats Leninakan from 1973, Aragats Kumayri after the city was renamed, then Aragats Gyumri, then Shirak-2, then simply FC Gyumri for two seasons at the turn of the century, and Shirak-2 Gyumri again from 2002. Through all of it the entity is treated as continuous — the same club under different letters.

Its trophies belong to two of those identities. As Aragats Leninakan it took the Cup of the Armenian SSR in 1973, and the same name won the Armenian First League in 1994, in the first years of independent Armenian football. The 1997 First League title came under the Shirak-2 badge. None of those wins could carry the side upward: reserve teams in Armenia are barred from promotion to the Premier League, so a first-place finish returns the team to the same division the following season.

Karen Khachatryan started here in 1998 and was in the senior side a year later, which is the job the team exists to do.