By Mark Baber
March 24 – Ukrainian football is a fair reflection of wider Ukrainian society – in deep crisis, dominated by oligarchs, plagued by neo-nazis, being drained of foreign talent, with significant elements seeing their future in Russia and others facing imminent bankruptcy.
The Ukrainian Premier League returned to action on March 15, with 15 clubs still involved in the competition. How many teams will be left by the end of the season is anyone’s guess, with the game between Sevastopol and Metalist Kharkiv recently cancelled due to safety concerns.
The fortunes of clubs in Ukraine are closely linked to political developments and (as ably documented by Manuel Veth on Futbolgrad.com) the clubs are owned and funded by rival oligarchs and often parts of media empires in what has been described as a ‘Berlusconification’ of football.
With the fall of one regime the oligarchs most closely identified with the previous regime fall out of favour, are arrested and imprisoned or force to flee and their clubs may go to the wall.
A case in point is Metalist Kharkiv whose owner, Serhiy Kurchenko has been placed on the EU’s sanctions list and has fled to Belarus ahead of attempts to arrest him, leaving the club in a dire financial position.
Metalist’s hopes may lie with the return to favour of their previous President, Oleksandr Yaroslavsky, an oligarch known as the ‘King of Kharkiv.’ who sold the club last December after being given “an offer he could not refuse” following a fall-out with Kharkiv’s mayor Hennadiy Kernes.
Kernes had been seeking to return the club to municipal control, but he has been under investigation for alleged “separatism.”
The owner of Shakhtar Donetsk is the richest man in Ukraine Rinat Akhmetov, (who also owns most expensive penthouse in the UK at One Hyde Park). Despite being a major financier of the Party of Regions, Akhmetov was recently offered governorship of the mainly Russian-speaking Donbas region, a poisoned chalice he declined. He has already been the target of Maidan protestors and it remains to be seen if he becomes a major target for “lustration”.
Ukraine’s instability has led to a flight of foreign talent, a severe blow to a League which has nurtured players, such as Willian and Fernandinho, before selling them on to richer clubs. One club hit particularly hard has been Chornomorets Odessa, whose president Leonid Klimov supports the Party of the Regions, based in an area which has seen large pro-Russian demonstrations, and which has had to release five foreign players from their contracts..
If that did not provide enough instability and problems, following the bankruptcy of Arsenal Kyiv, every club has an extreme (and often openly Nazi) right Ultra contingent attached to it. A significant number of these extremists played a role in the Maidan protests and now, trained and in some cases armed, pose a risk to the political stability of the country as a whole, having seen off their long-time enemies the riot police (or “Berkut”), who have been disbanded.
Contact the writer of this story at moc.l1734877633labto1734877633ofdlr1734877633owedi1734877633sni@r1734877633ebab.1734877633kram1734877633