Zorya Luhansk

The Avanhard in Luhansk holds 22,288, and Zorya have not played a competitive match there since 2014. When fighting reached the Donbas that year, the club left the city and settled in Zaporizhzhia, where its Ukrainian Premier League home games are staged at the Slavutych-Arena. The ground in Luhansk is still the club's registered home in name only; the squad trains and plays some 400 kilometres to the west.

What Zorya carry from the old city is a title no other Ukrainian club can claim in quite the same way. In 1972 they won the Soviet Top League — the only championship of the USSR taken by a side from the Ukrainian SSR outside Kyiv. Two Soviet Cup finals followed, in 1974 and 1975, both lost. The club had already been champion of the Ukrainian SSR in 1938, and again in 1949 and 1950, but the 1972 season is the one that fixed the name.

The fall afterwards was long. By the early 2000s Zorya were winning the Ukrainian Second League, group B, in 2002/03, and it took until 2005/06 and the First League title to get back to the top flight. They have stayed there since.

Black and white are the colours; the supporters' name for the team, Muzhyky — "The Men" — predates the move and travelled with it.

The best of the modern era has come without a trophy. Zorya reached the Ukrainian Cup final in 2015/16 and again in 2020/21, losing both, and finished third in the Premier League four times: 2016/17, 2019/20, 2020/21 and 2022/23.

A separate club calling itself Zorya was set up in Luhansk in 2023 and plays in the Russian Second League. It has no connection to the side founded on 5 May 1923.