FC Kairat

Also written as Kairat, Kairat Almaty.

The club

FC Kairat were founded in 1954 in Alma-Ata, now Almaty, as Lokomotiv Alma-Ata. They were Urozhay in 1955 and took the name Kairat in 1956, chosen on 18 June that year by the Council of Ministers of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic; the word means power. The club was developed by Nikolai Starostin, usually called the father of Soviet football. Kairat reached the Soviet Top League in 1960 and spent twenty-four seasons there as the only club from the Kazakh republic ever to play at that level, which is why they were known as the Nation's Team and are still supported across the whole country. The nickname is Sary-Qaralar, the yellow-blacks, and the home shirt is yellow and black stripes with black shorts and socks.

This is not the futsal club of the same name and the same city. AFC Kairat, founded in Almaty in 1995 as Kainur and renamed Kairat in 2003, won the UEFA Futsal Cup in 2012/13 and 2014/15 and has eighteen Kazakh league titles; Wikipedia carries an explicit hatnote separating the two. It is also not FC Kairat-Zhastar, the feeder club founded as Tsesna in 2010, renamed Kairat-Akademiya in 2012 and Kairat-Zhastar in 2019, which plays in the Kazakhstan First Division. Nor is it FC Kairat Moscow, a farm club set up in Russia's third tier in 2021 to exploit the Eurasian Economic Union rule under which Kazakh players do not count as foreigners, and dissolved in 2022. Between 1998 and 2001 the club itself existed as two separate entities, Kairat SHPFC and Kairat-CSKA, after a financial crisis put the team under Ministry of Defence sponsorship and half the squad refused to accept military control; Almaty deputy mayor Kairat Bukenov announced the reunification in 2001. The club's chairman is Kairat Boranbayev; any connection between his first name and the club's was not established from the sources read here. Kairat's main rivals are FC Astana, a meeting supporters call the Two Capitals Derby.

The ground is the Almaty Central Stadium, capacity 23,804. Construction began in 1956 on the initiative of Leonid Brezhnev, then the republic's leader, and the architect Adambay Kapanov modelled it on the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, which is why it was nicknamed the Small Luzhniki. It was commissioned in 1958 and staged its first official match on 10 April 1960, Kairat's Soviet Top League debut, a goalless draw with Admiralteyets Leningrad. Capacity was about 35,000 until a 1997 renovation replaced the wooden benches with individual plastic seats. The club took ownership of the ground in 2015 in exchange for thirty per cent of its shares. Kairat have had a cooperation agreement with Sporting CP since 2015 covering scouting, skills exchange and academy training camps.

The head coach is Rafael Urazbakhtin, appointed in May 2024, who has won the Kazakhstan Premier League and the Kazakhstan Super Cup with the club. Among his predecessors are Vladimír Weiss from 2012 to 2015, Kakhaber Tskhadadze from 2016 to 2017, Carlos Alós Ferrer from 2017 to 2018, Aleksey Shpilevsky from 2018 to 2021 and Kurban Berdyev from 2021 to 2022.

Recent seasons

Kazakhstan plays a spring-to-autumn calendar, so the league season carries a single year. Kairat won the Premier League in 2020 after a gap of sixteen years, won it again in 2024, and won it in 2025 with eighteen wins, five draws and three defeats from twenty-six matches, 53 goals scored and 19 conceded. The 2025 title took them into the Champions League and, for the first time, into its league phase.

The 2026 season is in progress. After twenty-one matches Kairat led the table with fourteen wins, six draws and one defeat, 42 goals scored and 15 conceded. They lost the 2026 Super Cup to Tobol on penalties, 5-4 after a 2-2 draw, and reached the round of sixteen of the Kazakhstan Cup.

Honours and landmarks

Kazakhstan Premier League champions five times, in 1992, 2004, 2020, 2024 and 2025, the first of those being the inaugural title after independence. Kazakhstan Cup winners a record ten times, in 1992, 1996/97, 1999/2000, 2001, 2003, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2021. Kazakhstan Super Cup winners in 2016, 2017 and 2025. Kazakhstan First Division champions in 2009, the year the club came back from bankruptcy.

From the Soviet era: Soviet First League champions in 1976 and 1983, and USSR Federation Cup winners in 1988, a final in which all four goals were scored by Viktor Karachun. In 1971 Kairat won the European Railways Cup, beating Rapid Bucharest 2-1, described as the first Soviet team to win a European tournament. Under Nikolay Glebov the side played 4-2-4 and 4-3-3 and was nicknamed Kairat Concrete for its defending.

The club's leading goalscorers are Yevstafi Pekhlevanidi with 105 between 1980 and 1989, Gerard Gohou with 99 between 2014 and 2017, Alibek Buleshev with 90 across two spells between 2000 and 2008, and Sergey Kvochkin with 81 between 1960 and 1969.

Dastan Satpayev, born in Almaty on 12 August 2008, made 41 league appearances for Kairat and scored 21 goals. At sixteen years and ten months he became the youngest Kazakh to play and to score in UEFA club competition, and on 26 November 2025 he scored against Copenhagen to become the first Kazakh to score in the Champions League. Kairat announced an agreement to sell him to Chelsea for around four million euros in February 2025; the transfer completed on 14 August 2026 and he joined Burnley on a season-long loan.

Notable scorelines

The heaviest defeat in the sources read here is 5-0 at home to Real Madrid in the Champions League league phase on 30 September 2025, with 22,788 in the Central Stadium. Kairat also lost 4-1 away to Sporting CP and 4-1 to Club Brugge. The best European scorelines of the modern era are modest by comparison: 3-0 at home to KuPS in July 2025 and 2-0 at home to Olimpija Ljubljana a fortnight earlier. Kairat's all-time record win and record defeat, in Europe and domestically, were not established from the sources read here.

The most consequential scoreline is a goalless one. On 26 August 2025 Kairat drew 0-0 with Celtic at the Central Stadium after a 0-0 at Celtic Park five days earlier, and won the shootout 3-2 to reach the Champions League league phase for the first time.

European record

Kairat's overall continental record, as tallied in the sources read here, is 84 matches, 32 wins, 16 draws and 36 defeats, 113 goals scored and 106 conceded. The detail of the earlier campaigns was not established from the sources read here.

The 2025/26 Champions League run began in the first qualifying round with a 1-1 draw at Olimpija Ljubljana on 8 July 2025, Dastan Satpayev scoring on 59 minutes in front of 4,877 at the Stožice Stadium, and a 2-0 win at home on 15 July through Jorginho on 5 minutes and Mrynskiy on 31, watched by 22,800. In the second round they lost 2-0 at KuPS in Kuopio on 22 July and won the return 3-0 on 29 July, Satpayev scoring after nine minutes, Jorginho on 29 and Gromyko on 43. In the third round they beat Slovan Bratislava 1-0 at home on 6 August, Satpayev scoring a 90th-minute penalty, then lost 1-0 at the Tehelné pole on 12 August in front of 21,005 and won 4-3 on penalties after extra time. The play-off against Celtic finished 0-0 at Celtic Park on 21 August with 56,182 present and 0-0 in Almaty on 26 August, and Kairat won the shootout 3-2.

The league phase that followed brought one point. Kairat lost 4-1 at Sporting CP on 19 September 2025, Edmilson scoring on 86 minutes; lost 5-0 at home to Real Madrid on 30 September; drew 0-0 at home with Pafos on 21 October in front of 16,478; lost 2-1 at the San Siro to Inter on 6 November, Arad scoring on 55 minutes; lost 3-2 at Copenhagen on 26 November with goals from Satpayev on 81 and Baybek on 90; lost 1-0 to Olympiacos on 9 December; lost 4-1 to Club Brugge on 20 January 2026, Adilet Sadybekov scoring in stoppage time; and lost 3-2 at the Emirates Stadium to Arsenal on 29 January, Jorginho converting a penalty on 7 minutes and Ricardinho scoring in the fourth minute of added time in front of 50,200. Kairat finished 36th of 36 with a single point.

Two of those home matches were not played in Almaty. The Olympiacos game in December and the Club Brugge game in January were both staged at the Astana Arena, the indoor national stadium; the reason was not established from the sources read here, though both fall in the Kazakh winter. The Club Brugge match drew 11,324, roughly half what the Central Stadium had been holding in the autumn.

The distance is part of the story. The trip from Almaty to Lisbon for the Sporting match, about 6,900 kilometres, is recorded as the longest journey in the history of the Champions League, and Kairat's other league phase away days took them to Milan, Copenhagen and London. Whether opponents formally objected to the journey east was not established from the sources read here.

Quotes

No directly quoted material from players or staff was confirmed from the sources read here.

Right now (2026/27)

Rafael Urazbakhtin is still the head coach and Kairat lead the 2026 Kazakhstan Premier League, unbeaten but for one defeat in twenty-one matches. Dastan Satpayev's move to Chelsea completed on 14 August 2026, in the middle of the European campaign.

That campaign started well and ended early. In the Champions League first qualifying round Kairat beat Sutjeska of Montenegro 2-1 at the Central Stadium on 8 July 2026, Áfrico scoring on 76 minutes and Marc Gual in stoppage time in front of 14,356, then won 2-0 in Nikšić on 16 July through Bekbolat on 68 and a Jorginho penalty on 82, for 4-1 on aggregate. In the second round they lost 1-0 at Omonia at the GSP Stadium in Nicosia on 22 July, then won 1-0 after extra time at home on 29 July, Edmilson scoring on 37 minutes in front of 19,135, and went through 6-5 on penalties after a 1-1 aggregate.

The third qualifying round against Levski Sofia was lost without a goal. Kairat lost 1-0 at the Stadion Georgi Asparuhov on 4 August 2026, Serginho scoring in the 92nd minute with a long-range effort that deflected in off Alyaksandr Martynovich, and Kairat failed to register a shot on target. The return on 11 August was moved away from Almaty to the Turkistan Arena in Turkistan because the Central Stadium was unavailable; only 7,000 were there to watch a second 1-0 defeat, and Kairat went out 2-0 on aggregate.

Beaten in the champions path third round, they dropped into the Europa League play-off round and drew Anderlecht. The first leg at the Central Stadium on 20 August 2026 was lost 3-0, an own goal by Jaakko Oksanen after two minutes followed by Ambros on 24 and Sikan in first-half stoppage time, watched by 17,563 with Chris Kavanagh of England refereeing. The second leg at the Constant Vanden Stock Stadium in Brussels was scheduled for 27 August 2026; its result was not established from the sources read here. Losing the tie would leave Kairat out of Europe altogether rather than in a league phase.

Sources

Researched and written for not4quarters. Where a fact could not be established from the sources read, this page says so rather than guessing.