Ordabasy

Bekhan Shaizada has worn the captain's armband and stood in Ordabasy's goal long enough to have played nearly every part of the club's rise: in 2023, under Aleksandr Sednev, Ordabasy won the Kazakhstan Premier League for the first time. Founded in Shymkent as Dinamo, the club spent the following decades renamed and re-formed — Enbek, Metallurg, Meliorator, Zhigar — while a separate city club went through its own sequence of names before the two merged in 2000. The present identity, Ordabasy, dates from 2003. Before the league title, the honours were mostly cup ones: the Kazakhstan Cup in 2011 under Viktor Pasulko, who added the Super Cup the following year, and again in 2022 under Sednev. Two more cup finals bookend that record rather than extend it — a 0-1 loss to Tobol in 2023, and a rematch with the same opponent set for 4 October 2025. The club's home end is named after Hadjimukan Munaitpasov at a ground holding 20,000. Among the forwards who have worn them, João Paulo, a Brazilian signing, stands as the club's leading scorer of the Premier League era, with his 2019 season the standout; further back, Tanat Nuserbayev was named the club's best striker in 2008 before later interest turned toward Astana. Ordabasy's fixture list runs hottest against Kairat, the Almaty club it contests both league position and continental places with, and against Taraz in what is billed locally as the southern derby. Games with Kaisar have carried their own edge in cup competition.