ONE HUNDRED YEARS ON THE PITCH

In fairness, both accounts are equally plausible. But whatever be the case, by 1913–1914, Semipalatinsk already had fifteen football teams, which was an impressive number for a city of around 35,000 people, especially given that outside Semipalatinsk, the game was still virtually unknown.

The first football club established in the city was the Semipalatinsk Sports Circle (SSC). Other teams soon followed, including Olymp, Lastochka (Swallow), Orlyata (Eaglets), Neptune, and Yarysh. The first truly official match took place in 1914, when SSC hosted a student team from Tomsk and secured a victory. The event was considered so significant that it was announced in advance on posters displayed throughout the city.

The venue for matches was the very site where, prior to the Revolution, the region's largest trading event, the famous Semipalatinsk Fair, had been held each autumn. A space once devoted to the exchange of goods gradually became a place for the exchange of emotions, excitement, and shared hopes over the outcome of a match. The market square was becoming an arena for a new urban culture.

That same year, 1914, Yarysh played the first international match in the history of Kazakh football. The opponents turned out to be prisoners of war from the First World War, who were German and Austro-Hungarian officers. Quite unexpectedly, some of them turned out to be footballers of world-class caliber. Two of them, according to some accounts, had even competed in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.

Thus, one of the darkest episodes of the era paradoxically became the source of Kazakhstan’s first international football experience. And so, in the shadow of war and captivity, this game found an unlikely foothold in the steppe.

Among the first players of Yarysh was a name that every schoolchild in Kazakhstan recognizes today, though for an entirely different reason. Mukhtar Auezov, who would later become the author of the epic novel The Path of Abai and one of the greatest Kazakh writers of the twentieth century, played as a midfielder for Yarysh. His teammates included the club's captain Akhmetsalim Karimov, as well as Kasym-khan Mukhamedov, Salah Khismatullin, and Ziyatdin Ryspaev.

It would be easy to dismiss this fact as a historical curiosity or an amusing detail. But its deeper significance lies elsewhere. The future symbol of Kazakh literature and the written word, an activist of the Alash movement, and one of the most prominent figures of the Kazakh intelligentsia of his era began his adult life on the football field alongside his fellow students from a teachers’ seminary.

For the generation that came of age at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was no unbridgeable divide between elite culture and popular entertainment. On the contrary, they were emerging at the same time. Football was not the opposite of intellectual life but its natural extension—a hallmark of modernity, just like the theater, newspapers, or the cinema.

At this point, it is worth stepping away from the history of football and looking at the broader context, at what was happening in Kazakhstan at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The steppe was undergoing a rapid, though uneven, transformation. Following the administrative reforms of the late nineteenth century, periodicals were spreading quickly across the empire, printing houses were opening in district and regional centers, and local newspapers were beginning to appear. The railway network was expanding, fundamentally reshaping logistics and trade and, as a result, accelerating the spread of new ideas and practices. At the same time, cities were developing wider telegraph networks, while cinema, photography, and other new technologies and forms of entertainment began to reach Kazakhstan.

It is true that the same transformation was taking place around the world. Everywhere, from London to Buenos Aires, the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a time in which the Industrial Revolution was giving rise to a new mass urban culture of leisure. Football became perhaps its most democratic expression.

The game required little more than a ball, an open patch of ground, and a group of like-minded players—no expensive equipment, membership fees, or exclusive clubs, as was the case with sports such as horseback riding or fencing. It was precisely this simplicity and accessibility that allowed football to spread rapidly beyond the boundaries of a single city.

What had begun in Semipalatinsk soon spread beyond the city. Between 1915 and1917, football teams had also begun to form in Pavlodar and Ust-Kamenogorsk (now Öskemen). Contemporary observers described them as ‘feral’ teams, that is, clubs formed without any official organization, sustained entirely by the enthusiasm of their players.

Then, for many years, the game faded into the background. The first wave of football in Kazakhstan coincided with one of the most turbulent periods in the nation's history. The Revolution and the Civil War shattered the established order, upending daily life across the steppe. What came next only deepened the rupture: forced collectivization, a devastating famine that claimed millions of lives, and wave after wave of political repression that decimated the Kazakh intelligentsia—the very people who might have nurtured the fledgling sport.

Under these circumstances, football, which had only recently become a symbol of a new urban culture, was pushed aside for many years. The sport managed to make a comeback only in 1934, when Kazakh teams took part in all-Union competitions for the first time. At the Tournament of the Four Capitals in Tashkent, the Almaty team finished third, behind the teams from Ashgabat and the host city.

In 1936, the first championship of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic was launched, with the Republic Cup awarded as part of the competition. In 1951, Shymkent’s Metallurg won the VTsSPS CupiThe VTsSPS Cup was a Soviet amateur football knockout tournament for teams of ‘physical culture collectives’, held from 1957 to 1991., and in 1959, the Football Federation of Kazakhstan was established. By this point, football had outgrown its origins as the pastime of a handful of enthusiasts. It had become a public institution.

In 1960, Kairat became the first Kazakh team to make its debut in the top division of the Soviet Championship. Over the next two decades, the club would repeatedly prove that Kazakh football could hold its own against the leading teams of the Soviet era.

The closing chapter of the Soviet era proved symbolic for Kazakh football as well. In 1989, Kairat striker Yevstafi Pekhlevanidi signed with the Greek club Levadiakos, becoming the first footballer from Kazakhstan to play abroad professionally. It happened two years before the country itself gained independence and faced the challenge of building its own footballing future, separate from the Soviet system.

There is another thread to this story, one that stretches back to the fairgrounds of Semipalatinsk more than a century ago and today brings the journey full circle. Today, the football tradition of Semey lives on through Yelimay, a club whose own history remarkably echoes the broader journey of Kazakh football.

Modern Yelimay grew out of a football tradition that had taken root in Semey during the Soviet era. Over the decades, the team competed under different names—first as Tsementnik, then as Spartak. After Kazakhstan gained independence, the club was renamed Yelimay in 1994.

It was under this name that the team entered its first golden era. Yelimay claimed the national championship three times—in 1994, 1995, and 1998—and added the Kazakhstan Cup to their trophy case in 1995. During those years, the Semey club became one of the symbols of a young Kazakh football tradition, competing on equal terms with the country’s strongest teams. It was also during this period that one of Kazakhstan's best-known football chants is believed to have been born:

The club’s history, however, was marked by more than just triumphs. In 2016, financial difficulties brought Yelimay to a virtual end, following the fate of many post-Soviet clubs whose survival had long depended on the support of a single enterprise or sponsor. It seemed that the club that had given Semey three championship titles had become a thing of the past.

The story did not end there. In 2022, Yelimay was officially revived, and just a year later, the renewed team won the First League of Kazakhstan and earned promotion to the Premier League, the country’s top division. KAZ Minerals became the club’s strategic sponsor, and the support quickly began to bear fruit: Yelimay not only established itself among Kazakhstan’s strongest teams but, for the first time in its new history, reached European competition, earning the right to compete in the UEFA Conference league.

For KAZ Minerals, football is more than a sponsorship opportunity—it is an integral part of the company's corporate culture. Every company within the Group has its own football team. At the same time, employees compete annually in five-a-side tournaments at the corporate Spartakiad and also take part in amateur football leagues.

Perhaps no other cultural practice has spread across the world as rapidly and as naturally as football. No one knows exactly how many people play the game—and it is difficult to imagine how such a number could ever be calculated. FIFA has nevertheless attempted an estimate, concluding that around 250 million people worldwide play football in a more or less organized way.

Born in England as a product of the industrial age, football has acquired a remarkable ability to speak hundreds of cultural ‘languages’ without ever losing its essential character. In every country, the game acquired its own distinctive identity—becoming English, Brazilian, Argentine, or Kazakh.

Perhaps this is football's greatest historical paradox: although it remains fundamentally the same game everywhere, it invariably becomes a game of its own wherever it takes root.