FK Kauno Žalgiris
Also written as Kauno Zalgiris.
The club
FK Kauno Žalgiris are a football club from Kaunas, Lithuania. They are not FK Žalgiris Vilnius, and the two should never be run together. Žalgiris Vilnius are the older and far more decorated club, the one with the long list of Lithuanian titles; the Kaunas club has won the national championship once, in 2025. The shared name is recent and was contested: the Kaunas club, then playing as FK Spyris Kaunas, announced a partnership with the Kaunas basketball club BC Žalgiris before the 2015 season and set out to take the Žalgiris name, and FK Žalgiris Vilnius filed a complaint on the basis of Lithuanian Football Federation regulations forbidding two teams from carrying the same name. The Kaunas club adopted the name formally at the start of the 2016 season. The legal case ran for two years and was decided in the Kaunas club's favour. Where a source says only "Žalgiris" of a Lithuanian club, it is more often Vilnius than Kaunas, and the two have played each other in the top flight for a decade.
The club was founded in 2004 as FM Spyris Kaunas, set up by coaches from the Kaunas football school Tauras to give its graduates somewhere professional to go. The first official match was on 1 May 2005, a 2-1 defeat to FK Sveikata of Kybartai. The early colours were yellow and blue. For the 2010 season alone the club was renamed FM Aisčiai Kaunas and finished as runners-up in its division. By 2013 it had reached the I Lyga, and it was promoted to the top flight for 2015, making its A Lyga debut on 1 March 2015 with a 2-1 win over FK Klaipėdos Granitas. That first season brought fifth place and a Lithuanian Cup semi-final. The colours now are green and white.
The ground is the Darius and Girėnas Stadium in the Žaliakalnis district of Kaunas, an all-seater holding 15,026, the largest stadium in Lithuania and in the Baltic states. It was rebuilt between 2018 and 2022 and has since added a 115 by 74 by 20 metre air dome for training.
The president is Mantas Kalnietis. Ownership is split between Paulius Motiejūnas, with seventy per cent, and Kalnietis, with thirty. The sporting director is Darius Šinkūnas. Betsson have been the main sponsor since 2022, renewed in July 2025 through 2027, and the kit has been made by Puma since 2025, by Hummel from 2017 and by Joma before that.
The head coach is the Croatian Željko Sopić, appointed on 29 June 2026 in place of Eivinas Černiauskas, who had been in charge for about a year and a half and who won the 2025 title. Sopić, fifty-one, played for Borussia Mönchengladbach among others and retired at Lokomotiva Zagreb in 2011; he began coaching at Rudeš in 2014 and has since managed Dinamo Zagreb, Al Ain, Sabah, Gorica, Rijeka, Widzew Łódź and Osijek. His best season was 2023/24 with Rijeka, runners-up in Croatia and beaten Cup finalists. He brought the analyst Josip Paušić and the fitness coach Ivan Čuković with him. The assistant coach is Algis Jankauskas. The precise reason for Černiauskas leaving was not established from the sources read here.
Recent seasons
Kauno Žalgiris finished third in 2020 and third again in 2021. In 2022 they were runners-up on 63 points. They fell to fourth in 2023 and were third again in 2024. In 2025 they were champions for the first time, 75 points from 36 matches, 22 wins, 9 draws and 5 defeats, 67 goals scored and 26 conceded, finishing eight clear of Hegelmann and thirteen clear of Žalgiris Vilnius. The season included a run of seven straight wins and a fourteen-match unbeaten sequence. Amine Benchaib scored 14 league goals for them, third in the division behind Eligijus Jankauskas of Šiauliai on 18 and Abdel Kader Njoya of Hegelmann on 15.
Honours and landmarks
Lithuanian top-flight champions once, in 2025, runners-up once, in 2022, and third three times, in 2020, 2021 and 2024. Lithuanian Supercup winners in 2026 and runners-up in 2023. No Lithuanian Cup win appears in the sources read here; the club's best Cup run recorded here is the 2015 semi-final.
The 2025 championship was the first major trophy in the club's history and came twenty years after its first competitive fixture. The 2026 Supercup, won on 16 February 2026 against FK Panevėžys by a single goal from the Latvian striker Dāvis Ikaunieks, was the club's first Supercup.
Notable scorelines
The club's best European result is the 3-0 home win over Penybont of Wales in the first qualifying round of the 2025/26 Conference League, part of a 4-1 aggregate. The heaviest European defeats are the 0-5 home loss to The New Saints in the second qualifying round of the 2021/22 Conference League, which with a 1-5 defeat in Wales made an aggregate of 1-10, the 0-5 loss away to Dinamo Zagreb in the 2026/27 Champions League third qualifying round, and the 1-6 loss away to Bodø/Glimt in the 2020/21 Europa League. The club's all-time domestic record win and record defeat were not established from the sources read here.
European record
Kauno Žalgiris first played in Europe in 2019/20 and lost the Europa League first qualifying round to Apollon Limassol, 0-2 at home and 0-4 away, out 0-6. In 2020/21 they went out of the Europa League at the same stage to Bodø/Glimt, beaten 1-6 in a single tie.
The first European win came in 2021/22, 2-0 at home to Europa of Gibraltar in the Conference League first qualifying round followed by a goalless draw away, then a 1-10 aggregate hammering by The New Saints in the second round. In 2022/23 they lost the Conference League first qualifying round to Ružomberok, 0-0 at home and 0-2 away. In 2023/24 they reached the second qualifying round and lost to Lech Poznań, 1-2 at home and 1-3 away.
2025/26 was the best campaign to that point. They beat Penybont 4-1 on aggregate, 3-0 at home and 1-1 away, then knocked out Valur of Iceland 3-2, drawing 1-1 at home and winning 2-1 away, before losing the third qualifying round to Arda Kardzhali of Bulgaria, 0-1 at home and 0-2 away.
2026/27, entered as Lithuanian champions, took them further than any Lithuanian club bar one. In the Champions League first qualifying round they drew 1-1 at home with Drita of Kosovo and won 3-2 away, through 4-3. In the second round they beat KÍ Klaksvík of the Faroe Islands 1-0 at home and drew 0-0 away. The third qualifying round was Dinamo Zagreb: a 1-2 home defeat and then 0-5 in Zagreb on 4 August 2026, out 1-7. That dropped them into the Europa League play-off round, where losing carries a club into the Conference League league phase rather than out of Europe.
Quotes
Darius Šinkūnas, the sporting director, on appointing Željko Sopić: "This coach has worked at strong clubs and in competitive leagues, coached high-level footballers and possesses extensive experience. His teams have always played intensive, aggressive attacking football, and these were exactly the qualities we were looking for because his football philosophy matches the identity of our club."
No directly quoted material from Sopić himself or from the players was confirmed from the sources read here.
Right now (2026/27)
Željko Sopić is the head coach, two months into the job.
The club are in the Europa League play-off round against Beşiktaş and losing it. The first leg was at the Tüpraş Stadium in Istanbul on 20 August 2026 and finished 3-0 to Beşiktaş, Hyeon-gyu Oh scoring on six minutes, Michael Murillo six minutes later and Orkun Kökçü from the penalty spot shortly before the hour. The return is in Kaunas on 27 August 2026. Beşiktaş go through with a win or a draw; a 3-0 Kauno Žalgiris win would force extra time. The result of the second leg was not established from the sources read here, because it had not been played.
Either way the club has already secured a place in the Conference League league phase, since the twelve losers of the Europa League play-off round enter it. That makes Kauno Žalgiris only the second Lithuanian club to reach the league phase of a European competition, after Žalgiris Vilnius in 2022/23. They are in pot six. The Conference League league phase draw is on 28 August 2026 at 13:00 CET, with the fixture list to follow by 30 August, so their eight opponents are not yet known.
Domestically the top flight is no longer the A Lyga: it was rebranded Toplyga for 2026, the first season in twenty-five years not to carry the old name, and it started on 21 February 2026, the earliest start in the history of the Lithuanian top flight. FK Riteriai were excluded in June after losing their licence, leaving nine clubs. The title defence is not going smoothly. Kauno Žalgiris are third, 38 points from 22 matches, 10 wins, 8 draws and 4 defeats, 41 scored and only 16 conceded, which is the best defensive record in the division. Sūduva of Marijampolė lead on 42 from 23, TransINVEST of Vilnius district are second on 39, and Banga of Gargždai and Džiugas of Telšiai are a point behind Kauno Žalgiris on 37. Šiauliai are bottom on 16.
The summer's business was measured rather than sweeping. Out went the German full-back Haymenn Bah-Traore and the Serbian striker Dejan Georgijević, who had scored eleven league goals. In came Dāvis Ikaunieks, the thirty-two-year-old Latvian striker, from RFS, the right-back Joris Moutachy of Martinique and the winger Motiejus Burba both from Žalgiris Vilnius, the Brazilian Léo Ribeiro from Hegelmann and the Japanese defensive midfielder Yukiyoshi Karashima from RFS. Pre-season was played in Turkey against strong opposition and included a win over Dynamo Kyiv.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FK_Kauno_%C5%BDalgiris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_A_Lyga https://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_m._TOPLYGA https://toplyga.lt/turnyrine-lentele/1 https://balticfootballnews.com/toplyga-2026-preview-will-kauno-zalgiris-go-back-to-back/ https://balticfootballnews.com/official-croatian-coach-zeljko-sopic-appointed-as-new-kauno-zalgiris-head-coach/ https://www.dailysabah.com/sports/football/besiktas-poised-to-seal-europa-league-passage-against-kauno-zalgiris https://www.uefa.com/uefaconferenceleague/draws/ https://www.espn.com/soccer/match/_/gameId/401902668/kauno-zalgiris-dinamo-zagreb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026%E2%80%9327_UEFA_Europa_League_qualifying_phase_and_play-off_round
Researched and written for not4quarters. Where a fact could not be established from the sources read, this page says so rather than guessing.