Johvi Phoenix

The club spent a single season in Estonia's top flight, in 2014, and it did not survive it. Ninth place, then relegation back down at the first attempt. Four years later, in February 2018, the team gave up the name it had carried since its founding, Lokomotiv, along with its red-and-white colours, and became Phoenix: orange and black, with a stylised bird's head on the badge. For a while afterwards there was no senior side to speak of — only youth football — before the club returned to adult competition in 2020, starting again from the third tier.

The rebuilding shows in Elisei Zakharov's 2023 season: 34 goals in the second division, a club record, and he remains one of the team's attacking threats going into the 2025/2026 Esiliiga B campaign that followed promotion in 2024. At the back, Denis Kulikov has carried the shirt through most of this story without wearing it throughout — he began in 2005 with the old Orbiit side, was part of the team that finished runner-up in the First Division in 2013 under the Lokomotiv name, left, and came back in 2022 to captain the defence as Phoenix.

Matches now take place at the Heino Lipp Stadium, which holds 794 spectators. Domestically the club's honours sit in the lower tiers — Second Division titles in the north-east zone, in 2009 and again in 2012, and a fourth-tier championship in 1999 — all won under the two earlier names. Before any of them existed, there was Jõhvi JK Orbiit and the town's youth sports school.