Arsenal Tula

Arsenal's sharpest needle points toward Voronezh. Matches against Fakel are billed as the Chernozemye derby, a rivalry rooted less in trophies than in geography - both clubs sit on the black-earth belt that gives the fixture its name. A newer edge runs toward Moscow: games against Torpedo turned pointed in 2014, when the two sides met in a play-off for a place in the Premier League, and the needle has stayed there since, even without an official name for the fixture.

The club grew out of the workshops of the Tula Arms Plant, fielding its first side in 1925 under the name Oruzhzavod. Tula's own football history, as the club now tells it, starts two years earlier still, with a representative match played on 5 September 1923 - a date the club marked with a centenary in 2023. Through the Soviet decades the team changed its name almost as often as its sponsor: Zenit, Trud, Shakhtyor, Metallurg, Mashinostroitel, TOZ. Arsenal was settled on only in 1984.

2006 brought the sharpest break in that history: funding and professional status disappeared, and the club spent a season in the amateur leagues as Oruzheynik before returning as Arsenal-Tula in 2008. It was Dmitri Alenichev, appointed in 2011, who rebuilt it - with names that had no business in the Second Division: Yegor Titov, Vladimir Beschastnykh, Dmitri Khlestov, Dmitri Ananko, Vadim Evseev, Yuri Kovtun, Alexander Filimonov. Dmitri Parfyonov, one of that group, later returned as head coach.

The side they rebuilt reached the Premier League and, in 2018/19, finished 6th - still the highest league placing in the club's history - while also reaching the semi-final of the Russian Cup. Arsenal Stadium, home since the arms-plant days, has held 19,241 since a 2014 rebuild. In 2023/24 the club finished 4th in the First League and lost in the promotion play-offs - the kind of match that, against Torpedo, has come to mean rather more than three points.