FC Gomel

Gomel go into this season in the Belarusian top flight, a place the club has had to win back more than once. The pattern is written into the record: relegation in 1995, again in 2009, then in 2015 and 2019, and each time a return by way of the second tier. Three of those climbs came as champions of the First League — 1997, 2010, 2016.

What sits above that is the cup. Gomel have won the Belarusian Cup three times, and the spacing tells you something: 2001/02, then 2010/11, then 2021/22, roughly a decade apart, each arriving in a different era of the club.

The club that did all this began in 1959 as Lokomotiv, and spent most of the Soviet decades attached to the city's combine harvester plant as Gomselmash, before the plain city name arrived in 1995 and stayed.

Home is the Central Stadium, 14,307 seats. The emblem went elsewhere: a lynx on a green triangle, and the nickname followed the badge rather than the shirt.

The Lynx is what they answer to now.