FC Bunyodkor, a club in the Uzbekistan Super League, has begun receiving tangible financial support from the state.
According to the club's press service, 5 billion soums (roughly $420,000) have been allocated to support the team. The funding was provided under Presidential Resolution No. PQ-107, signed on March 24, 2026, "On Measures to Improve the Mechanisms for Financing the Sports Sector and Expand the Involvement of Business Entities in the Sector." Club officials thanked the head of state and government officials for these reforms and their attention to developing football in the country.
The club added that the statement was meant to reassure its die-hard fans — wording that hints at the very concern the funding is meant to address. Bunyodkor's players and coaching staff, the statement said, are continuing preparations for the Super League's next round of matches according to plan, with no disruptions.
The state's willingness to step in reflects the outsized place Bunyodkor still holds in Uzbek football, even in a leaner era than the one that made it famous. Founded in Tashkent in 2005 as Kuruvchi, meaning "builder," the club rose from the regional leagues to the top flight within two years and quickly became the country's dominant domestic force, winning five league titles between 2008 and 2013 along with four domestic cups.
Domestic success was only part of the story, Bunyodkor holds a legendary status for single-handedly putting Uzbek club football on the global map. Between 2008 and 2010, Bunyodkor pursued a level of ambition rarely seen in Central Asian football: it signed Brazilian World Cup winner and Ballon d'Or recipient Rivaldo from AEK Athens, brought in fellow Brazilian great Zico as head coach, and then appointed Luiz Felipe Scolari — the manager who had led Brazil to the 2002 World Cup — the following year. Reunited with Rivaldo in Tashkent, Scolari guided the club to an unbeaten Uzbek League title in 2009, reportedly on a salary among the highest paid to any coach in the world at the time. For a brief but remarkable stretch, the signings put a club barely three years old into the global football conversation.
That era did not last — both Rivaldo and Scolari left in 2010 — but its effects on Uzbek football outlived it. Bunyodkor's academy has since become one of the country's most productive, helping shape the generation now representing Uzbekistan at its first-ever World Cup. Abdukodir Khusanov joined the club's youth system at age seven and rose through its ranks until 18, before a path through Belarus and France's Ligue 1 led him to Manchester City in 2025, in a transfer reported at around €40 million that made him the first Uzbek player in Premier League history. Eldor Shomurodov, now Uzbekistan's national team captain, played for Bunyodkor from 2015 to 2017, a spell that led to his move to Russia's Rostov and, from there, to Serie A.
The club genuinely elevated the entire level, professionalism, and international reputation of football in the country. Framed against such a history, the new state funding reads less as a rescue than as an investment — a bet that a club long treated as central to Uzbek football's development, on the pitch and off it, still has more to give the national game.
