Shakhtar Donetsk: A Ukrainian Football Team Forced to Play Only Away From Home

Shakhtar Donetsk’s Europa Conference League run has become a symbol of Ukrainian resilience amid the war, transcending club rivalries and offering hope. Forced from their Donbas Arena since 2014, Shakhtar have played across Ukraine and Europe while rebuilding after talent losses and FIFA rulings. Their mix of young Ukrainians and Brazilian recruits reflects a longstanding strategy. Supporters cherish the run, though some say peace matters far more than football. Make us preferred on Google Flip Share Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Bluesky Email Copy Copied Shakhtar Donetsk fans displaying proud flags in a stadium. Photo: Alex Webber Content Share Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Bluesky Email Copy Copied Flip Make us preferred on Google Shakhtar Donetsk headed into last Thursday’s Europa Conference League semi-final trailing 3–1. While their chances of overturning Crystal Palace’s first-leg lead appeared slim, for their supporters just reaching this stage was a triumph. With Russia’s war in Ukraine settled into a grinding stalemate, Shakhtar’s run to the semi-final has given Ukrainians something positive to rally around – and if a place in the final proves a step too far, their supporters remain unfazed. Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official . “Thank you, guys, just for getting this far,” one fan told TVP World. “Ukraine needed this.” Shakhtar’s marathon run – the match marked their 22nd outing of the European campaign – not only lifted Ukrainians, it also offered neutrals the kind of Cinderella story missing from a sterile modern game largely bereft of romance. “Everyone loves an underdog,” one Palace fan, Simon, told TVP World amid boisterous pre-match scenes outside Krakow’s Bulldog Pub. “If they weren’t playing my team, I’d want to see Shakhtar go all the way.” On Thursday Shakhtar lost 2-1, and 5-2 on aggregate. Yet it would be wrong to cast Shakhtar as minnows. Backed by billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, the club has amassed 15 domestic titles since first lifting the league in 2002 and established itself as a regular presence on the European stage – winning the UEFA Cup in 2009 and appearing in three major European semi-finals in the last ten years. Other Topics of Interest Ukraine’s Mahuchikh Wins World Indoor High Jump Gold, Levchenko Takes Silver Ukraine’s Yaroslava Mahuchikh cleared 2.01 meters to win gold at the World Indoor Championships, while Yuliia Levchenko claimed silver. Looking beyond the trophy cabinet, home games before the war were routinely played in front of crowds of over 50,000 at the state-of-the-art Donbas Arena: attendance figures double that of their English opponents tonight. Under different circumstances, it would be the South Londoners approaching this game as the unfancied outsider, but the war has done more than level the playing field – it has stripped Shakhtar of the very turf they once stepped out on, and in the most literal of senses. When the Donbas Arena welcomed Beyoncé for its opening night in 2009, few would have imagined that five years later it would be getting hit by artillery rounds as Ukrainian armed forces battled pro-Russian separatists for control of the city. Shakhtar Donetsk fans cheer on their team. Photo: Alex Webber Last playing in Donetsk in 2014, the ensuing years have seen Shakhtar lead a wandering, Gypsy-style existence, staging league matches in a variety of locations: Kharkiv, Kyiv and Lviv. Their European ‘home’ has shifted further still with games played in Germany and Poland – Wisła Krakow’s Henryk Reyman Stadium serving as their primary European base over the past two seasons. Home, though, is a relative concept. With Krakow sitting more than 1,000 miles from Donetsk, a ten-hour drive from the team’s training base in Kyiv, and air travel only possible once across the Ukrainian border, just getting to home fixtures is an 18-hour odyssey. By contrast, when Shakhtar faced Lech Poznań earlier in the competition, their Polish opposition made the trip to Krakow in just 45 minutes. Despite the logistical hurdles, European nights carry a different kind of weight, serving as a rallying point for the displaced Ukrainian community: an act of solidarity above anything else. “I’m a Dynamo Kyiv fan,” one supporter, Sasha, told TVP World before last week’s match. “We should hate each other, but at times like this, we have to support one another. This goes beyond club rivalry. It’s about standing together for our country.” Nor is he a lone voice. Around him, others speak above the growing din, professing allegiances to a variety of clubs. That this is not a conventional football crowd is immediately apparent. Lacking the usual rowdy cluster of twenty- and thirty-something lads, in their place are women, young children, and teenage youths barely old enough to remember when Shakhtar last played at home. Some have traveled not just from elsewhere in Poland, but from further afield: Germany, France, and the UK. Among this number, several originally hailed from eastern Ukraine. “We’ve got the flag of the Donetsk region here,” one teenager told TVP World. “For those of us from there, this is more than a football game; it’s a chance to remind the world that our land is under occupation. We don’t want to be forgotten.” It is not the only flag, either. Along the barriers, banners hang in honor of the fallen: photographs of smiling soldiers, their brief lives reduced to two dates: birth and death. In the heavy presence of such poignant reminders, it becomes clear why football has taken on a different meaning here, functioning no longer as a sport but as a means of holding on to identity. “I don’t even like football, but I’m proud to be Ukrainian,” one flag‑waving woman told TVP World. Tellingly, however, it is not just the Ukrainian diaspora that are flocking to Shakhtar’s European games, but also South Americans. Shakhtar Donetsk fans outside the Henryk Reyman Municipal Stadium in Krakow. Photo: Alex Webber Building their modern success on a pipeline of South American talent, particularly Brazilians, since the early 2000s, players of the caliber of Fernandinho, Willian, Douglas Costa, and Fred have rolled off the Shakhtar production line: recruited young, refined, and then sold on to Europe’s elite for eye‑watering sums. Most recently, that’s meant the winger Kevin joining the Premier League side Fulham for a club‑record €40 million at the start of this season. But while Kevin may have flown the nest, Shakhtar still retains 14 Brazilians on its payroll. Mirroring this, in the stands, an influx of South American backpackers and expats has added a burst of color to Shakhtar’s European nights. The prospect of being based in a war zone has done little to deter Shakhtar’s stream of Brazilian recruits, many of whom see the risk as a price worth paying for an established route to the top. This formula says Shakhtar’s chief executive, Serhii Palkin, is tried and tested. “We have been dealing with Brazilian players for more than 20 years, and for all these years, we have big, big trust, because they understand Shakhtar is a bridge to go to the top European leagues,” he told reporters. “When we are negotiating with them even today, we are not selling them comfort because everybody understands the world,” he added. That mindset has no doubt been reinforced by the energetic optimism of their manager, former Barcelona and Turkey midfielder Arda Turan, who took the reins a year ago. “Arda is a special guy, a young, emotional guy, hungry and full of ambition,” Palkin told the press. “For him, coaching in Turkey would be in his comfort zone—but he doesn’t want that. When I called him, he said, ‘I want to come immediately.’ He doesn’t care about the war – he’s not afraid of anything.” Yet if ‘the Shakhtar way’ sounds straightforward, in practice it has been anything but. As if the first shock of war – and the loss of their true home –was not testing enough, Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 pushed the club to the brink. “After February 2022, around 11,000 professional players left Ukraine, including players from our academy who are now in Barcelona or Bayern Munich,” says Palkin. “It was a big problem for us, because we lost top talents, and had to recover, and invest more in our academy.” Sporting director Darijo Srna has been more blunt: “FIFA killed us,” he says. As if this exodus of youth talent was not enough, FIFA compounded the problem by allowing foreign players to leave Ukraine for free, a move Shakhtar says cost them a potential €85 million ($100.2 million) windfall in transfer fees. The club, though, has rolled with the punches. Despite losing a subsequent legal challenge against football’s governing body, Shakhtar recalibrated and rebuilt around a young Ukrainian core before, once again, turning to Brazil to feed the next cycle. That work is now paying off, and while the team faces a Herculean task to swing the tie back in their favor, it would be a fool that writes them off – greater obstacles have already been overcome. But even success here would come at a price Ukrainians would happily accept. “Reaching the final would be magical,” says Sasha. “But all of us would trade it for a just peace. Right now, all we dream about is peace, peace, and peace.” This is an updated and slightly abridged version of a report for TVP World by its feature writer, Alex Webber.