Uni Minsk

On 4 March 2025, Uni Minsk collected a licence from the Belarusian Football Federation for the Pershaya Liga, the country's second tier — the sort of paperwork that rarely makes a match report, except that the club receiving it still plays its home fixtures at Grugany, a ground that holds 788 people. Fifteen years earlier there had been no ground, no licence, and no professional ambition at all: a group of students at the Belarusian National Technical University put together a team to play amateur football and called it Uni.

For most of the next decade that was the whole story. Uni stayed in the ALF amateur league, took the ALF Cup and the ALF Super Cup, and finished among the leaders of the ALF top division without any pressure to go further. The step up came in 2022, when the club entered the Second League and turned professional. The First League licence three years later was the second step, not the first.

Arol Ngintsop has scored more than anyone else who has worn the shirt, 24 goals across his time at the club, the kind of tally that matters more at a side still building a history than it would at one with decades of scorers to compare him against.

The club now belongs to X-Labs Inc, and the shirt has stayed close to its origins in another way: black at home, white away, nothing added for the sake of it. Minsk-2 and BFSO Dinamo are the sides Uni measures itself against most often, though no one has yet given either meeting a name of its own.

What Uni Minsk is now was decided before any of that — by a handful of BNTU students who wanted a team to play for.