Slava Moscow

In 1979 and again in 1982, a rugby side attached to a Moscow clock factory took the Soviet championship. Slava came out of the Second Moscow Clock Factory, where general director Dmitry Paramonov backed the team into existence in 1974, and within five years it was beating the establishment at its own game. The Soviet Cup followed three times, in 1981, 1985 and 1989.

The Russian league era has been less kind to the trophy cabinet. Slava has reached the domestic cup final three times — 1992, 2014, 2015 — and lost all three, and its best league finishes have been silver in 2008 and bronze in 2007 and 2019, never the title itself. What has held steady is the pipeline: the club runs the Moscow Rugby Academy, putting more than 400 young players through it, and it was that system rather than the transfer market that produced Andrey Igretsov, who won 26 caps for Russia as a prop, and winger Igor Kurashov, capped 15 times before he left to collect five championships with Enisei-STM elsewhere.

South African imports have filled out the squad over the years — Andrew Kun, Martin Dreyer and others arrived on that route — but the fixture that matters locally needs no import. Slava's derby against Dynamo Moscow is the one match in the calendar that draws a crowd regardless of league position. That crowd fits, just about, into Slava Stadium on Selenyovskaya Street, 1,300 seats in yellow and red, a ground built for a factory team that outgrew the description a long time ago.