Start

Mordovia's football history spent the better part of a decade inside a training centre. Mordovia made Start their home from 2010, playing there through the club's rise into the Russian top flight, until the purpose-built Mordovia Arena opened across the city in 2018 and took over as the senior venue.

That switch didn't retire Start — it freed it up. In the 2016/17 season, while several Premier League clubs found their own grounds unfit for use, Start took in their fixtures as a stand-in venue: Ufa, Krylia Sovetov, Orenburg and Tula all played home matches here during reconstruction elsewhere. It's the kind of role a training complex can play when it has a proper pitch and enough capacity, but rarely gets asked to.

The 2018 World Cup left its own footprint, not on the main pitch but on the training fields alongside it — Peru's squad based their preparations there, drawn by the site's cluster of additional grounds. The main arena itself had gone through its own reckoning a few years earlier: persistent problems with the pitch surface once led the Russian Football Union to bar matches from being played on it, a situation resolved only when an artificial surface went down in 2015.

These days Start answers to more modest tenants. Shumbrat, competing in the lower reaches of Russian football, used it as a base in the 2023/24 season, while youth, junior and student sides keep the calendar filled. The venue now sits under the same management umbrella as the Mordovia Arena and the region's water sports palace — a support ground for a city whose spotlight has moved on.