VVA-Podmoskovye

Krasny Yar and Yenisey-STM sit across the table from VVA-Podmoskovye more often than anyone else, and Slava Moscow crops up nearly as regularly. There is a reason the club rarely needs to explain itself before a match.

It started as a base team at the Yuri Gagarin Air Force Academy, set up on the initiative of the academy's commander, Marshal of Aviation Semyon Krasovsky, with Evgeny Antonsky taking the first side out as head coach. That air force lineage is still there in the nicknames, Pilots and Military Pilots, and it explains why the town of Monino carries a rugby club of national standing.

The Soviet years brought nine championships before 1987, then the club went quiet before Moscow Region governor Boris Gromov backed a reorganisation in 2003 that turned the side into the Moscow Region Rugby Centre under the VVA-Podmoskovye name. What followed was a run rather than a single trophy: seven Russian titles in eight seasons, broken only by 2005, built under Nikolai Nerush, who later took the same discipline to the national team and steered Russia into its first Rugby World Cup qualification. In 2013 the club added a partnership with Saracens in England.

Vasily Artemyev, who went on to captain Russia at a World Cup, came through this system, as did Igor Mironov, capped 75 times for the USSR and remembered as one of its most prolific scorers.

Seventeen Soviet and Russian championships, thirteen national cups.