For this soccer team, every game is a road game
The miracle of Ukraine’s most dominant soccer club over the past decade isn’t so much its continued success while the country has been at war. Nor is it the team’s reconstruction after losing all of its foreign players. The real surprise for Shakhtar Donetsk, based in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, is that it has kept winning despite not playing a single home game since 2014.
Ten years ago, Shakhtar fled the city it had called home for over half a century when it fell under control of pro-Russia separatists. The club immediately scrambled to ferry some 500 staffers, players, and coaches to safety in the western part of Ukraine, thinking that they might return in a matter of weeks—a couple of months at most. Now it’s been a decade.
Shakhtar hasn’t set foot in Donetsk since. “Ten years under the gun," the club’s CEO Serhiy Palkin says, “and we are still waiting." Instead, one of Ukraine’s most storied teams pulled itself together in new homes, borrowed stadiums, and temporary accommodations in Kharkiv, Kyiv, and most recently Lviv for domestic league games. Matches in European competition were more challenging, as European soccer’s governing body deems Ukraine too unsafe to stage games.
So for its most prestigious outings in the Champions League, where it rubs shoulders with the likes of Chelsea and Barcelona, Shakhtar makes roughly 15-hour trips to its own home games in places as far afield as Poland and Germany. And yet, none of the uncertainty has stopped Shakhtar from winning. Through its years on the permanent road, the club has turned into a flag-bearer for Ukrainian sports muddling through a national and existential crisis.
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