Football revives in Ukraine behind closed doors

Eduard Kinzerski’s gang of journalists hug and laugh in the empty stands of the Olympic Stadium in kyiv. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other in a long time. Zinkerski is the oldest chronicler in the group following Shakhtar Donetsk, the leading team in Ukrainian soccer. He started reporting on his matches 20 years ago. “I haven’t missed any,” he adds, excited. He hasn’t watched football for eight months: the Russian invasion, which began last February, forced the end of the competition. This Tuesday, in an exercise of courage unusual in the history of this sport, the Ukrainian soccer league started with Russian bombs still terrorizing the country.

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The opening match of the championship was Shakhtar against Metalist 1925 from Kharkov. Metalist will play their home games in one of the three kyiv stadiums set up for the championship. Its sports facilities in Kharkov were bombed last June. The second city of the country, in the east and 25 kilometers from the Russian border, suffers indiscriminate attacks every day that make a public activity such as football unviable.

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Shakhtar is another team in exile, since 2014. Their city, Donetsk, was taken that year by pro-Russian separatists in the war in the Donbas region. Since then, the club owned by the richest man in Ukraine, Rinat Akhmetov, has followed an exodus that saw it first set up its headquarters in Lviv, in Kharkov and, since 2020, in kyiv.

The last league was canceled and without declaring the winner, but Shakhtar was the first classified, so from September they will play the qualifying phase of the Champions League. Their home stadium for international matches will be in Warsaw, Poland, and the Lviv Arena will be their home ground for the national league, according to Curro Galán, Shakhtar’s goalkeeping coach. Galán joined the club last July from Atlético de Madrid, where he has been a goalkeeping coach for five years. Galán explains that, more than for the adventure or the money, he opted for Shakhtar to fulfill his dream of playing in the Champions League. The headquarters in Lviv is explained by the proximity of this city to Poland.