Shakhtar’s Long Road Home After Stamford Bridge Victory

Shakhtar Donetsk’s 3-1 Champions League win over AEK Athens at Stamford Bridge was followed by a journey that underlined the abnormal reality surrounding the Ukrainian club. After playing a nominal home fixture in London, Shakhtar’s squad were due to rise at 6 a.m. on Thursday, take a 10 a.m. charter flight to Rzeszow in Poland and continue by bus across the border into Ukraine, with a best-case arrival time of 9 p.m. local time.

A Champions League home match far from Donetsk

Stamford Bridge has become Shakhtar’s Champions League base this season, with Chelsea able to make the stadium available after missing out on European football. The arrangement places a Ukrainian side from Donetsk against continental opponents in London, while their actual home remains inaccessible.

Shakhtar have not played at the Donbas Arena since May 2014. In the years since, domestic fixtures have been staged in Odessa, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Lviv, while European matches have taken the club through Warsaw, Hamburg, Gelsenkirchen, Krakow and Ljubljana before the move to London.

• Ukraine’s civilian airports remain closed.
• Opponents cannot, or will not, travel into a country where air-raid alerts are frequent and attacks remain a threat.
• Shakhtar’s matches have consequently become both sporting events and a visible expression of Ukraine’s continued presence in European competition.

Sporting director Dario Srna said the club’s role extends beyond its own supporters. “We play for Ukrainians around the world,” he said. “Wherever we have gone, they have come to watch. We represent Ukraine at the centre of the world; it is bigger than just Shakhtar.”

The unusual setting was clear around the ground. Street sellers offered unofficial scarves carrying the names of Shakhtar players including Pedrinho, Mykola Matviyenko and Valeriy Bondar, while a cardboard image of Dwayne Johnson had been altered to feature Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Inside the stadium, AEK supporters filled the Shed End with flags, tifo and noise, making themselves more audible than the designated home support.

Victory followed by another long return journey

The result against AEK gave Shakhtar an important 3-1 victory, but there was little scope for a conventional post-match recovery. The team’s route back through Poland and into Ukraine involved an overnight turnaround and the prospect of returning to uncertain power, heating and air-raid-shelter conditions.

The logistical burden is now part of life for a club trying to remain competitive at the highest level. Real Madrid are due at Stamford Bridge on Jan. 27, another Champions League occasion in which Shakhtar will technically be the home team despite being more than 1,500 miles from Donetsk.

The figures keeping Shakhtar in the fight

Shakhtar’s modern success was built with the backing of owner Rinat Akhmetov, whose mining and energy wealth helped bring the club major stature before the war. Willian, Fernandinho, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Douglas Costa were among the players developed or showcased by the club before moving to bigger leagues.

Akhmetov, a Donetsk-born ethnic Russian, has an estimated fortune of nearly $8 billion. He was previously a member of parliament for the party of former pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and had financially supported Yanukovych, but split from him in 2014. Although he has had past disagreements with Zelenskyy, Akhmetov remained in Ukraine after the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Srna said Akhmetov’s decision reflects his commitment to the country. “After everything he has witnessed, he cannot leave Ukraine,” Srna said. “He has devoted himself to helping the economy and helping people, while spending nights under bombardment.”

The contrast with Chelsea’s recent ownership history adds another layer to Shakhtar’s use of Stamford Bridge. Roman Abramovich, Chelsea’s former owner, was required by the UK government to sell the club following the 2022 invasion because of his links to Russian president Vladimir Putin. Abramovich, whose mother is Ukrainian, holds Portuguese, Israeli and Russian passports, while his yachts are based in Turkey.

Srna’s personal connection to war

Shakhtar’s squad is international, with a large Brazilian contingent and Turkish head coach Arda Turan, formerly of Atlético Madrid and Barcelona. Srna, however, has spent 23 years at the club, first as captain and later as sporting director. He says he declined the opportunity to lead Barcelona’s recruitment operation around a decade ago because of his attachment to Shakhtar and Ukraine.

“Ukraine and Shakhtar are in my blood,” Srna said. “If I left now, I would not be able to live with myself.”

The Croatian knows the impact of conflict from childhood. He was eight when war began in the former Yugoslavia in March 1991, a conflict that lasted four and a half years and divided communities along ethnic lines. His father supplied baked goods to the military each day during that period.

Srna said the return of war has brought back feelings he first experienced as a child in Croatia. “I recognise this pain and I recognise this feeling,” he said, before expressing anger at the human cost of the conflict: families destroyed, deaths, and children left with lasting psychological trauma.

• Srna believes time has helped Croatia and Serbia build a more workable relationship three decades after the Yugoslav conflict.
• He said new generations can look back at what happened and avoid treating every individual as responsible for the past.
• But he added that, at present, friendship with Russians feels impossible to him, even if he believes that could change over years or generations.

For Shakhtar, maintaining a football club in these conditions is an attempt to preserve something recognisable amid war. The Champions League campaign offers victories, fixtures and familiar sporting stakes, but every match remains tied to the reality of a team without a home stadium, travelling back to a country still living under attack.