Vorskla Poltava

Oleksandr Kucher came up through Shakhtar Donetsk's academy before finding his way to Poltava, part of a string of players who arrived at Vorskla after starting elsewhere. The academy has produced its own names too, Pavlo Isenko among them.

That continuity survived a genuine scare in 2004, when the club's main backer, Naftohaz of Ukraine, pulled its funding and left Vorskla to be rebuilt under president Oleg Babayev. Five years later, in 2009, Vorskla beat Shakhtar Donetsk 1–0 to win the Ukrainian Cup. They were runners-up for the Ukrainian Super Cup that same year, and returned to cup finals in 2020 and 2024 without adding to the tally. A third-place finish in the Ukrainian Premier League came twice, in 1996–97 and again in 2017–18, either side of a Europa League group-stage campaign in 2011–12.

Locally, the fixture that matters is against Neftekhimik Kremenchuk, the other side of the Poltava Oblast. The 2024–25 season ended in relegation to the First League after a playoff defeat to Polissya-2 Zhytomyr, a reminder that the club has had to climb back before.

It started under a different name. On 5 January 1955, on the initiative of Mikhail Stakhursky, the club was set up as Kolos Poltava, later known as Kolhospnyk, and it was as Kolhospnyk that it won the Ukrainian SSR Cup in 1956. The name Vorskla, taken from the local academy, came only in 1984.