Şahdağ

The Şövkət Orduxanov Stadium in Qusar has stood half-finished since work began in 2016; the rebuild stalled in 2024, and Şahdağ now play their home matches at the Shamakhi Olympic Sports Complex instead, waiting on a ground that is nominally theirs but not yet ready to hold them. When it is finished it is meant to hold between 4,000 and 5,000.

The club traces back to 1950, when it was registered as Nefteqaz, and by 1990 and 1991 it was competing in the Soviet Second League. Independence brought it into the first Azerbaijan Premier League in 1992 as one of twenty-six founding clubs, but the following decade wore the project down: financial trouble forced it to stop operating altogether before it was rebuilt in 2000. A brief spell under the name Şahdağ-Samur followed in 2003 before the club reverted to Şahdağ. History repeated itself in 2017, when money problems again shut down the senior side, leaving only regional football and the youth academy until professional status returned in 2023.

That return paid off last season: in 2024–25 Şahdağ won the Azerbaijan Third Division outright, going unbeaten across 26 matches to earn promotion back to the Birinci Dəstə, the level they had first reached by winning the Second Division in 1997–98. A runners-up finish in 2008–09 sits between those two title years.

Şahruddin Məhəmmədəliyev wore the orange and black in 2013, a season before he moved on to become a fixture for Qarabağ and the national team. Locally, the fiercest fixture is against Zaqatala FK, known as the Şimal derbisi, the Northern Derby, while matches with Şəfa FK carry their own edge without a name attached to it.

None of that changes what the club grew out of: a works team called Nefteqaz, founded in a mountain town in 1950.