PFC Sochi

Games against Krasnodar and Rostov carry the label Southern derby, the fixture the Leopards' supporters mark on the calendar first, sharper for being road games rather than long trips across the country. There's needle with Zenit too, though it comes from the standings rather than geography — the two clubs have crossed paths fighting for the same league positions, which keeps the rivalry alive without ever making it a derby.

That kind of table-topping tension produced the club's high point: in 2021/22 Sochi finished second in the Premier League, its best league placing, with Mateo Cassierra leading the line on 14 goals that season. No trophy has followed it into the cabinet. The nearest thing to one came earlier, in 2018/19, when the club finished runner-up in the second-tier FNL on its way up to the top flight. Kristian Noboa is still the club's all-time top scorer with 40 league goals, and Nikita Burmistrov has made more appearances than anyone else to wear the shirt, 177 in total. For one stretch of 2019/20, Alexander Kokorin scored seven goals in ten matches, a run short enough to be remembered as a spell rather than a season.

Home games are played at Fisht, the Olympic stadium, in front of a capacity of close to 46,000, and the team plays in blue and white. It answers to Leopards, a nickname that outlasted the plainer "blue-and-whites."

The club itself dates to 4 July 2018, and it started life as a transplant rather than a creation from scratch: the squad and coaching staff of St Petersburg's Dynamo, led by Alexander Tochilin, moved south under new owner Boris Rotenberg. That move gave Sochi, a city that had already seen one senior club fold and another come and go, a single professional side to call its own again.