Krasnodar Women

The Olympus Arena seats 3,000, and Kuban still shifts some fixtures to the Handball Academy across town.

Kuban's roots reach back further than its own founding date. Yuri Korchagin put together the first women's team in Krasnodar in 1965, and it took until 1973 for Alexander Tarasikov to establish the club properly, under the name Selskhoztekhnika.

The peak came at the end of the 1980s. Kuban won the USSR Championship in 1989 and again in 1992, having already collected back-to-back EHF Cup Winners' Cups in 1987 and 1988, and reached the final of the EHF Champions Cup in 1990.

What followed was a long run of near-misses. Four straight runner-up finishes in the Russian Super League between 1997 and 2000 gave way, after the turn of the century, to bronze medals in 2017 and 2019 rather than titles. The closest recent shot at silverware came in the 2017 Russian Cup final, lost to Rostov-Don, the club against which every meeting is billed as the Southern Derby, the oldest rivalry in Russian women's handball.