Kairat players celebrate after winning the European Champions League playoff second leg match in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on August 26, 2025. Photo: VCG

After Kazakh football club FC Kairat qualified for the European Champions League (ECL) group stage, Chinese fans discussed the chance of visiting Almaty to watch the ECL teams.

Kairat's qualification marks only the second time a Kazakh club has reached this stage after FC Astana did so in the 2015-16 season.

Almaty, the home of FC Kairat, lies just across the border from China. By air, it is approximately 840 kilometers from Urumqi, capital of Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and the fastest direct flight takes around 1 hour and 50 minutes.

Currently it is visa-free for people of Chinese nationality to visit Kazakhstan.

En route to Kairat's group stage presence, they've defeated league champions from Slovenia, Finland, Slovakia, Scotland. The team have become the easternmost team to ever qualify for the ECL since the introduction of the group stage.

"Congratulations to Kairat on entering the group stage! Truly impressive, starting from the very first qualifying round," a post on the online sports-fan community platform zhibo8 reads.

"A team not far from Xinjiang has reached the ECL group stage. Let's go watch the ECL in person," another one reads.

Kazakhstan officially became a member of the European football governing body UEFA in 2002, thus making its clubs available for participating in European football matches.

The league phase draw for the 2025-26 ECL season is scheduled for Thursday in Monaco, and it will determine which European giants the fans will get to see in Almaty.

Under the new format of the UEFA, 36 teams are divided into four pots and each club will face eight different opponents: two from each pot, one at home and one away.

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