Arif Mirzoýew

Arif Mirzoýew was a Turkmen professional footballer who played as a forward across more than two decades in the top flight of Turkmenistani football, and who also represented the Turkmenistan national team. Born on January 13, 1980, in the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, he came through the domestic game at a time when Turkmen clubs were beginning to compete more regularly in Asian continental competitions, and he built a long career that included a spell abroad with Azerbaijan's Neftchi Baku in the early 2000s before returning home to play for clubs including Nisa Aşgabat and, in his later years, FC Altyn Asyr, one of the country's most successful sides.

He was known to Turkmen football followers as a reliable, experienced forward who stayed in the professional game far longer than most of his contemporaries, still turning out in senior football into his mid forties. For a country where organized football has a relatively short history since independence, players like Mirzoýew who wore the national shirt helped give Turkmenistan a presence on the regional stage, including in World Cup and Asian Cup qualifying matches.

According to publicly available records, Arif Mirzoýew died on November 10, 2026, at the age of 46. As of this writing, no detailed statement about the circumstances of his death, including its cause or location, had been made public by his family, his club, or the Turkmenistan Football Federation. People Forever will update this page as soon as verified details become available.

Readers should note that in the days after November 10, 2026, a separate news story spread widely reporting the death in Fulda, Germany, of a man also named Arif, an Azerbaijani Honored Artist and composer whose body was being returned to Azerbaijan for burial. That report concerns a different person entirely: an Azerbaijani composer, organist and pianist born in 1944, not the Turkmen footballer who is the subject of this page. The similarity of the two men's names appears to have caused confusion online, and this page has been written carefully to describe only the footballer Arif Mirzoýew.

Mirzoýew is remembered by those who followed Turkmen football as a durable, dedicated professional whose career spanned the formative years of the sport's growth in his country.