Chelyabinsk

In Higher League A, Dynamo Chelyabinsk has twice reached the final step below the top, taking silver in 2017–18 and again in 2021–22, without yet turning either run into a title or adding a Russian Cup to the cabinet. The club got there only after climbing out of the tier below, earning promotion into Higher League A in the 2013–2014 season.

The team plays out of the Metar-Sport Sports Palace on Chernyakhovsky Street, a ground with room for 1,500 that became home in the summer of 2014. Alexey Andreev has coached the side since 2021, with Dmitry Lepyokhin wearing the captain's armband. The 2021–22 squad that went on to take silver was rebuilt in part around players arriving from Novosibirsk after Lokomotiv's junior team there was disbanded, among them Slava Kostadinov, Roman Murashko and Denis Golubev.

Games against Lokomotiv-Izumrud of Yekaterinburg carry the weight of the Ural Derby, while fixtures with Magnitogorsk sides are known locally as the Derby of the Southern Urals.

The Dynamo name is comparatively recent: the club took it in the summer of 2017, when its leadership agreed to bring the team under the umbrella of the Dynamo sports society, a move that brought fresh backing and organisation. Before that it had spent decades as Torpedo, the name it carried once the team was transferred to the Chelyabinsk Forging and Pressing Plant in 1986. Its roots go back further still, to a team called Almaz, put together in the early 1980s at the Chelyabinsk Machine-Building Plant named after Ordzhonikidze — the starting point from which the club has grown for over four decades.