Recently Oleksandr Zinchenko was in Ukraine again. He hadn’t been there for a long time, after all there had been a lot going on for him in the past year and a half. Zinchenko became English champion with Manchester City, left Pep Guardiola’s team and moved to Arsenal, who promptly became the champion’s major rival for a season. The magazine Politico the midfielder said a few weeks ago some things footballers say: “Our mission is not to give up. We have to keep fighting until the end until we win.”
But this time it wasn’t about football, it was about the war. Oleksandr Zinchenko had just attended a school in his homeland that no child can go to anymore.
It was in Chernihiv Oblast, the Ukrainian international in a gray T-shirt was standing next to the Ukrainian football idol Andriy Shevchenko, individual wooden slats were hanging vertically from the roof behind them, the interior of the school was a field of rubble. A year ago, a Russian missile hit the building. Zinchenko now wants to help rebuild the school. He said, shaken: “It’s completely different if you see all these messages on your phone or laptop or with your own eyes.” In August, money is to be raised for the school at a game in London.
Friendlies can serve very different purposes, and when Ukraine are opponents in their 1,000th international match in Bremen this Monday, the visitors will also want to test their form and settle in. It’s football. Ukraine will play North Macedonia in the European Championship qualifier on Friday and Malta three days later. But of course it’s also about the war. He is always there for the Ukrainian team.
Oleksandr Zinchenko isn’t in the Ukrainian squad because of a calf injury against Germany, but others say that the war affects football and football affects people in war. Serhiy Rebrov, for example, the new Ukrainian national coach. He coached a club in the United Arab Emirates for two years, but of course he has followed very closely how Russia’s war affected football at home in the Gulf as well. In his inaugural speech last week, he thanked the Ukrainian armed forces “for defending independence, Ukraine, and giving the chance to host a championship, to even talk about football.” It’s not that natural.
The European football clubs optimize themselves, the Ukrainian ones improvise
At the end of May, the club Shakhtar Donetsk became Ukrainian champions for the 14th time. Seven of his players are in the squad for the Germany game. The fact that Donetsk has not been able to play in Donetsk since 2014 is one of the biggest constants for the club. At that time, Russia, with the help of separatists, started a war in Donbass, Donetsk’s modern stadium was damaged, and the club shuttled between Kiev and Lviv in western Ukraine. Everything has changed since the start of the Russian war of aggression in February last year. The term “home game” has lost its meaning in Ukraine: Shakhtar Donetsk played at home in Kharkiv, Kiev, Lviv, Rivne, Uzhgorod, Mynai. In the Europa League, the home games took place in the Polish capital of Warsaw. Russia’s rockets rush the Ukrainian champions.
Whether at Shakhtar Donetsk, at Dinamo Kiev or Dninpro: national players who play for Ukrainian clubs experienced this in the past season – first division games, to which no spectators were allowed to come for security reasons, which were repeatedly interrupted by air raid alarms. The players then had to flee sweating to nearby shelters. Of course, just a few days ago, the national players couldn’t just fly from Kiev to Bremen. They took the train across the Ukrainian-Polish border to Chełm, then on to Warsaw, and only from there did they fly to Germany. The European football clubs optimize themselves, the Ukrainian ones improvise.
Part of the transfer fee is now spent on prosthetics and families of fallen soldiers
However, logistical inconveniences are less of a problem for Ukrainian football. The clubs lack money because there are no spectators in the stadiums, investors have failed and Uefa decided after the start of the war that foreign players could leave their clubs free of charge. This is also part of the new football reality: When Ukraine international Mykhailo Mudryk switched from Shakhtar Donetsk to Chelsea in January, part of the record transfer fee of 100 million euros was spent on prostheses and for families of fallen soldiers and the Mariupol defender .
The depressing news from home also affects the Ukrainian internationals who, like Mudryk, play abroad in Everton, Bournemouth, Bordeaux or at Real Madrid (goalkeeper Andriy Lunin). Russian air raids on Kiev, attacks on Odessa, concerns about the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, fighting on the fronts in the east and south, most recently the blowing up of the Kakhovka dam – there’s always some horror. For a year and a half, the Ukrainian football millionaires have not just been distracted by the Playstation, they have deliberately distracted themselves from the gloomy news, the Telegram chats with Ukrainian friends and families.
Serhiy Rebrov, the national coach, now wants his team to disperse the people of Ukraine. With the game against Germany, “against such an opponent”, he should be able to do it. “I think this friendly is very important for both our states,” Rebrow said. “It’s the 1000th game for Germany.” He didn’t have to explain why it was important for Ukraine.
