FC Astana

The football club that carries the city's name is younger still.

What followed had no obvious precedent in the country. The trophies arrived first in the cups — the Kazakhstan Cup in 2010, then again in 2012 — and only afterwards in the league. From 2014 the club won the championship five seasons running, added a sixth in 2019, and a seventh in 2022. In a league where the title had moved around, that run of five made Astana the reference point everyone else measured themselves against.

The 2016 season was the fullest of them: the league and the cup in the same year, the only time the club has held both at once. The Super Cup, played as the curtain-raiser, has been theirs six times, most recently in 2023 — a fixture the club has treated as worth winning rather than as a warm-up.

Nobody has settled on one nickname. The Yellow-and-Blues comes straight from the light blue and yellow of the shirt; The Citizens and Sary-Kökter both circulate too, depending on who is doing the shouting.

Home is the Astana Arena, which also answers to Kazhymukan Stadium, and which holds 30,000. It sits in a capital built fast and in the open steppe, where winter arrives early and the roof over the pitch is not a luxury. On the biggest European nights, the yellow half of the ground is the part visitors remember.