Shakhtar Donetsk has had a decade of away games amid war, yet football giant keeps winning
Shakhtar Donetsk hasn’t been able to play at home since 2014, due to war and instability in the Donbas region of Ukraine. But the club hasn’t stopped winning either, writes JOSHUA ROBINSON.
The miracle of Ukraine’s most dominant football 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. In the middle of a war, it now stands on the brink of clinching its sixth league championship after leaving Donetsk.
“Sometimes you feel fear, sometimes you feel angry,” says Shakhtar captain Taras Stepanenko, a veteran midfielder who joined the club in 2010. “But you have to cope with this situation to be strong…to fight for your country, for your family, for your club. If you’re weak, you can’t do anything.”
Few professional sports teams of Shakhtar’s standing have dealt with greater emergencies and somehow kept playing. Though the 2021-2022 season was abandoned following the Russian invasion, Ukrainian football only took a brief hiatus. By the summer, mere months after the conflict exploded, the league was back and Shakhtar was on the hunt for trophies.
“It’s difficult to destroy our club,” Palkin says. “These last 10 years, we became very, very strong fighters.”
Shakhtar had little choice in the matter: the only other option was simply ceasing to exist.
On May 2, 2014, the club notched a 3-1 victory over Illichivets Mariupol in Donetsk to all but clinch the championship. But the celebrations didn’t last long. Days later, separatists formally asked to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, plunging the region into chaos and raising the prospect of imminent violence. Palkin knew that Shakhtar couldn’t stay.
“Day by day, the situation was worse,” Stepanenko remembers.
Shakhtar has since racked up more than 200 home games in various homes away from home. That’s nearly twice as many as Shakhtar had played in its actual home, the $400 million, 52,000-seat Donbas Arena, which opened in 2009.
A place to play isn’t all that Shakhtar has lost in recent years. After the invasion, a squad with a reputation for importing flashy Brazilians and the best of Eastern Europe was decimated when at least a dozen foreign players chose to bolt. Its highly regarded Italian manager, Roberto De Zerbi, also left after less than a full year. He landed at Brighton and proceeded to turn the club into one of the most exciting attacking units in the English Premier League.
“The first four months no one knew what to do,” Stepanenko says.
Under emergency provisions created by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, players were allowed to suspend or break their contracts with Ukrainian clubs, which Shakhtar argued put it at a disadvantage. Fearing that unscrupulous agents would try to profit from the confusion and cause Shakhtar to miss out on fair transfer fees, the club filed a complaint against FIFA. The case was dismissed last year by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
In the meantime, the club was left to rebuild by promoting teenagers from its youth academy and hoping for the best. Over the years, an entire generation of players graduated to Shakhtar Donetsk’s first team without ever playing a match in Donetsk.
“For me, it’s like a knife in my heart,” Stepanenko says. “We left all our houses, our lives, our training camp, our stadium…Every day, you live a normal life and think, OK, in one month all will be finished and we go back.”
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Stepanenko is still waiting. Back in 2014, once he realised his team wouldn’t be moving back to Donetsk anytime soon, he relocated his family to Zaporizha and later to Spain. These days, he goes without seeing his wife or three sons for a month or two at a time. This is the sacrifice that he’s prepared to make to keep Shakhtar on the pitch and Donetsk on people’s minds.
“In this period, I gave myself fully to the club,” Stepanenko says. “Before the matches, after the matches, we say that we play for our people, our nation, and the people who protect our country.”
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