Irakli Azarovi

Irakli Azarovi broke through at Dinamo Batumi, where he went from squad member to regular starter and, in 2021, picked up both the Erovnuli Liga Defender of the Year award and the Best Young Player of Georgia prize. Within a year he had left Georgian football behind for Red Star Belgrade.

In Serbia he made 21 league appearances across a single season, enough of a platform for Shakhtar Donetsk to move for him in August 2023, reportedly paying around €3 million to bring him to Ukraine.

He made his Georgia debut in June 2021 in a friendly win over Romania, and he was part of the squad through the qualifying campaign that ended in Georgia reaching Euro 2024 for the first time. He was named in the 26-man squad for the tournament itself but did not get onto the pitch in the finals. Caps have kept coming since, through the 2024–25 Nations League and into the qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup, without a goal yet to his name at international level.

At Dinamo Tbilisi, where he came through the youth ranks before his senior debut in 2019, he was still a fringe figure, making just a handful of league appearances before the move to Batumi reshaped his career.