Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk

BRIT

The club was formed in 1918 by the Petrovsky factory and was called BRIT (Brianskyi Robitnychyi Industrialnyi Tekhnikum). The team participated in the regional competition, the Katerynoslav championship. BRIT played its games in the "Sokil" stadium, a small venue located at the corner of Pushkin and Yuriy Savchenko streets, which it shared with four other clubs.

Petrovets – Stal – Metalurh

With the outbreak of World War I, BRIT was disbanded until 9 May 1925, when a new team was formed in Dnipropetrovsk. The team participated during the first season under the name Petrovsky factory, which was changed in 1926 to "Petrovets." The team entered the first Soviet competition under the name of Stal (steel) in 1936, participating in three championships before World War II. In 1947, the team re-entered the Soviet competition after merging with another club from Dnipropetrovsk, Dynamo Dnipropetrovsk. From 1949 until 1961, the team was called Metalurh ("metal worker"). From 1950 to 1952, it was relegated to amateur status due to poor results. In 1954, Metalurh Dnipropetrovsk reached the semi-finals of the USSR Cup, where it lost to Spartak Yerevan.

Dnepr or Dnipro

In 1961, the team was handed over to its new sponsor, the Yugmash (the Southern machine-producing factory), which at that time was one of the most powerful factories in the entire Soviet Union and was funded by the Ministry of Defense. It was part of the Zenit volunteer sports society. The new sponsor changed the team's name to Dnepr/Dnipro after the Dnieper River. For the All-Union competitions such as Soviet Cup and the Soviet Top League as well as the international competitions there was used Russian version of the name as the Russian was the accepted language of the Soviet Union and the Soviet government, while at republican level (within the Ukrainian SSR) Ukrainian version of the name was used. The team's performance did not change much until after 1968, when Dnepr obtained Andriy Biba and the new coach – Valery Lobanovsky. After that, it took the team three years to get promoted to the Soviet Top League and eventually finished in sixth place in 1972.

Golden generation

In 1973 and 1976, Dnepr reached the semi-finals of the USSR Cup. In 1978, the team was relegated to the lower league for two years. Their next return to the top flight was not as inviting as their first one and the team languished at the bottom of the table for several years. In the following years, the governing body of the team hired new promising coaches – Volodymyr Yemets and Hennadiy Zhizdik. After those changes, Dnepr became a strong contender for the Soviet championship winning it twice: once with Yemets and Zhizdik in 1983, and another one with Yevhen Kucherevsky in 1988. Also, in 1989 Dnepr became the first professional football club in the Soviet Union. During those years, the team featured many notable players such as Oleg Protasov, Hennadiy Lytovchenko, Oleksiy Cherednyk and Oleh Taran.

Ukrainian independence

Just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1989 the club was transformed into a professional football club instead of the Soviet "team of masters", a process through which all Soviet teams of masters went through. The club joined the football federation of the native country and remained one of the top contenders in the newly formed Ukrainian Premier League. The team received a silver medal in 1993, as well as the bronze in 1992, 1995, 1996, 2001 and 2004. The team also reached the Ukrainian Cup finals in 1995, 1997 and 2004, losing all three to Shakhtar Donetsk. In the beginning of the 1990s the control of the club took over a native of Rivne Ihor Bakai with his "Respublika" corporation who earlier in the 1980s was governor of the SKA Karpaty Lviv training center, part of the Carpathian Military District. Bakai who invited Bernd Stange to Dnipro became first who hired foreign manager to head the former Soviet club. At that time Bakai was a member of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) and a chairman of the Intergaz corporation which had exclusive rights of importing gas to Ukraine from Turkmenistan and in Ukraine was unofficially referred to as the "Gaz King". The experience of the former manager of East Germany national football team Bernd Stange in Dnipro was described in the biographic book that was published in Germany in 2004 "Trainer zwischen den Welten. Bernd Stange" (Coach between the Worlds. Bernd Stange).

During the summer of 1996 Dnipro initiated "repositioning" of its best players along with Bernd Stange to CSKA-Borysfen which in the previous season placed 4th just behind Dnipro. Among those players were Oleksandr Yevtushok, Viktor Skrypnyk, Serhiy Kovalets, Serhiy Mizin, Andriy Polunin, Serhiy Nahornyak, Volodymyr Sharan, Oleksandr Palyanytsya. However, just few day before the start of the 1996–97 season in Ukrainian Vyshcha Liha (Higher League), on the joint session of the Professional Football League (PFL) and the Football Federation of Ukraine (FFU), CSKA-Borysfen was taken away from its original owners and handed over to Mikhail Grinshpon ("Kiev-Donbass") connected with Semion Mogilevich. With the transfer of Dnipro players falling completely through, players ended up in danger of missing a season.