When world football association FIFA awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia, President Vladimir Putin started talking about the Second World War. His hometown of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) was bombed for nearly three years, Putin told the FIFA executive in his acceptance speech. There was no electricity, no running water, no food and no heating. But, Putin said, even during that tragic period, football continued. “Football helped people persevere and survive,” the president said.
Now that Putin has himself unleashed a war in Ukraine, things are different in the attacked country. Last weekend, the top football league was due to resume after a long winter break, but the Ukrainian federation has suspended all matches for at least 30 days due to the Russian invasion. It seems unlikely that the competition will resume next month. On Wednesday morning, February 23, a day before the raid, players were still relaxed on the training field, can be seen in videos on the websites of Ukrainian clubs. A day later, Ukrainian football pros found themselves in the midst of a hopeless war. Their foreign teammates have now fled the country – often with great difficulty – according to messages on social media.
So are the stars of Shakhtar Donetsk, leader in the discontinued competition with two points ahead of Dinamo Kiev. At Shakhtar, no fewer than thirteen Brazilians are under contract, including attacker David Neres, who came over from Ajax in January for twelve million euros. For days they camped with their compatriots from Dinamo in a hotel in Kiev, before fleeing across the border via the southern city of Chernivtsi.
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“Thank God we are safe with our family,” Neres wrote on Instagram on Tuesday after arriving in Romania.
The Shakhtar Brazilians: they are players in exile from an already displaced club. For rival Dinamo Kiev and many other Ukrainian clubs, armed conflict was relatively remote until this week. Shakhtar was already confronted by war violence in 2014, when pro-Russian separatists thanks to Russian aid took power in the eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, whose main cities are Donetsk and Luhansk.
Even then Shakhtar players fled the war head over heels. Such as captain Darijo Srna, currently technical director at the club. The Croat later said that he and his family only took the bare necessities with them because they thought they would return soon.
Shakhtar on the run
Things went differently. The war in eastern Ukraine continued and the imposing Shakhtar Stadium, completed in 2009, was badly damaged. City mate Metallurg Donetsk ceased to exist, Shakhtar went to play his matches on the other side of the country. First in Lviv, 1,200 kilometers from Donetsk. Then Shakhtar moved to Kharkiv in the northeast, to move to Kiev in 2020. In the meantime, the club had also housed its headquarters, youth academy and players of the first team in the capital.
But Kiev did not become a new home, Shakhtar director Sergei Palkin told the English newspaper a few years ago The Guardian† Although the club and its fans are not known for being pro-Russian, everything at Shakhtar was geared towards one day returning to the city that is the heart of the 2014 breakaway ‘People’s Republic’. “If you were to tell me now that a return is never possible, I think we would close the club,” Palkin said at the time. “Donetsk is our home.”
Since Shakhtar drifted adrift due to the violence, performance has declined, especially in Europe
The nearly ninety-year-old club is therefore closely associated with the mining region that spawned it. Shakhtar means ‘miners’, the emblem has two crossed hammers and the club colors black and orange refer to the contrast between shadow and sunlight in the coal mines. Home games in its own Donbas Arena regularly drew more than 50,000 spectators – attendance numbers that even Dinamo Kiev can’t come close to.
Success has contributed greatly to that popularity. Thanks to owner Rinat Akhmetov, a coal and steel magnate and the richest man in the country, Shakhtar has been the dominant club in Ukraine for years. Since Akhmetov got his hands on the club in 1995, he is said to have invested about a billion euros in it. He is also personally responsible for the large number of Brazilians in the roster, says Jan Streuer, who worked as chief scout and advisor for Shakhtar from 2007 to 2016. “Akhmetov was crazy about Brazilian players. So we had to look for that. He always wanted to see the images beforehand. If Akhmetov was satisfied, they were captured,” Streuer said.
No adjustment issues
The focus on Brazilians worked out well. Because players like Fernandinho, Douglas Costa and Fred came, who would later reach the European top. But also because they were brought to Shakhtar with so many at once. “As a result, they didn’t have any adjustment problems,” Streuer says. The team played attacking football, a contrast to the defensive-minded Dinamo Kiev. In 2009, Shakhtar achieved its greatest success when it beat Werder Bremen in the UEFA Cup final (now Europa League).
Since Shakhtar has been adrift by the war, the performance has diminished, especially in Europe. Akhmetov, once a supporter of the pro-Russian ex-president Viktor Yanukovych but for several years opposed to Russian interference in Ukraine, keeps Shakhtar alive with his money. Competition matches in Lviv, Kharkov and Kiev usually attracted a few thousand spectators. Not bad for Ukrainian standards, but much less than the club was used to.
Whether Shakhtar will ever play football again in Donetsk is highly uncertain, just as it is doubtful whether the refugee Brazilians will ever return to Ukraine. For now, the players and employees of the club have something else on their mind. As director Sergei Palkin puts it in a statement on the website: “We are now only thinking about an end to this bizarre war. To the Ukrainian soldiers, to defending our country and the right to sovereignty and independence.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of March 2, 2022
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