Aragvi Dusheti

Aragvi Dusheti head back into Erovnuli Liga 2 for the 2026 season, the reward for finishing 4th in Liga 3 last year and then winning a penalty shoot-out against Lokomotivi in the play-off. The second tier has been a difficult place for the club before — a 10th-place finish in 2020 and relegation after another play-off loss in 2024 — so staying up this time would count as progress in itself.

The town side from Dusheti, in the Mtskheta-Mtianeti region, has spent most of the last decade shuttling between that division and the third tier. In 2023 the team topped a 16-club Liga 3 group with 21 wins from 30 matches and 66 goals scored, its clearest domestic title to date. In the Georgian Cup, the best run came in 2023 too, when wins over Varketili II and Gardabani carried Aragvi to the last sixteen before Bakmaro ended it 0-3.

None of that was guaranteed a few years earlier. By the end of the 2000s the club had effectively fallen apart, its municipal funding gone, and only the football school kept working through the gap. Shiola Shiolashvili's side lifted the reserve team back to the top of Meore Liga in 2008-09, a result that mattered less for the table than for keeping the name alive. The proper return came in 2017, when sponsorship from Jaba Credit put a first team back on the pitch; that squad finished second in Regionuli Liga Group B and then beat Skuri 2-1 in a play-off to reach Liga 3.

Davit Kokiashvili now manages the team from the Central Stadium in Dusheti, a 2,000-capacity ground on Platon Ioseliani Street, with Baba Nuho and Murodjon Tuychibaev among the foreign names in the squad this season. One player who never made an appearance for Aragvi's first team, Vazha Tarkhnishvili, moved on to Kartli in 1990 and later built his career at Sheriff Tiraspol, where he made more than 500 appearances, won the Moldovan title eleven times and captained Georgia; he now works as the Moldovan club's sporting director. Aragvi itself was founded in 1954, long before any of that history was written.