With martial law, stadiums with air-raid shelters and decimated teams, the Ukrainian Premier League begins

With martial law in place, in stadiums equipped with air-raid shelters, with decimated teams and companies that will not even be able to compete, the Ukrainian Premier League The 2022/23 season will begin on Tuesday, the most atypical since it began playing in 1992, with the war in the background. In this way, the ball will roll again in this country after a 305 day stoppage.

Shakhtar Donetsk and Metalist 1925 will open the event at the Olympic Stadium in Kiev from 7:00 am (Argentina time). Some time later three more matches of the first round will be played, while the next day Rukh Lviv and Metalist Kharkiv will compete (the other three matches of the first day have been postponed). The dates chosen to give the green light to a tournament that looks like a patriotic victory don’t seem random before the Russian invader: Tuesday is National Flag Day and Wednesday is Independence Day.

This championship, which will span 30 dates, is expected to end on June 3 next year, although it will have a long winter break between November 26 and March 4. The classics between Shakhtar and Dynamo kyiv will be played on October 15th and April 22nd. All this if the delicate situation that the country is going through allows football to keep its calendar.

The road to this relaunch has been a long one. On December 12, 2021, Kolos defeated Minaj 2-1 at home in their stadium in Kovalivka, 80 kilometers southwest of Kiev. Defender Oleksandr Chornomorets’ goal, 45 minutes into the second half, was the last to be celebrated on Ukrainian soil. After the usual winter break, the event was to resume on February 25, but one day before Russian army troops crossed the country’s northern border and the sport was forgotten.

In those early days of the war, dozens of foreign footballers left the country (FIFA decided that they could suspend their contracts until June 30, 2023), while some Ukrainian footballers enlisted in the Territorial Defense Battalions. On April 26, faced with a gloomy outlook, the Premier League General Assembly decided to permanently cancel the tournament without consecrating a champion. The table of positions was used only to define the ranking at continental tournaments. A) Yes, Shakhtar Donetsk and Dynamo Kyiv entered the Champions League; Dnipro, in the Europa League; and Zorya Luhansk and Vorskla Poltava, in the Conference League.

In June, Shakhtar and Dynamo played friendlies across Europe to raise money for war victims, and Arena Lviv was a 2,000-seat shelter. In those days and on the initiative of Ukrainian President Volodímir Zelenski, the resumption of the local tournament began.

This required several meetings between the authorities of the Ukrainian Football Association (FAU), the Premier League, the Ministries of Youth and Sports, Defense and Interior and the State Emergency Service. The images of those conclaves in which sports leaders conversed with soldiers in combat uniforms showed the atypical nature of the situation. Finally, on 18 July, the start day of the championship was announced. However, there is still no fixed date for the start of the Ukrainian Cup, the promotion matches and the women’s championship.

It is clear that for the authorities this decision is not only aimed at giving some economic relief to the battered coffers of the clubs (in these days the Premier League has signed an agreement with the Irish chain Setanta Sports for the broadcast of the matches that will bring back revenue for 16.2 million dollars) and a moment of relaxation for a population affected by the war, but which also seeks to be one more victory in the symbolic battle with Russia.

“When it seemed that this mission was impossible, we were inspired by the example of the Armed Forces. We have seen how the soldiers at the front heroically repelled the invaders, how they freed the Ukrainian land from the enemy meter by meter and this gave us strength. The courage of the military has strengthened our belief that we can relaunch football in Ukraine, “said Andrii Pavelko, president of the FAU, after the last preparatory meeting before the start of the tournament on Thursday.

Along the same lines, the Premier League management said in a statement published on their website on Friday: “Sports competitions during the war become, among other things, a demonstration of our fearlessness, our confidence in victory and our willingness. to keep fighting. Holding football competitions will send a strong message, have a powerful social mission and will also serve as a mental comfort for our people. “

In order for the tournament to start in a country where martial law is still in force, it was necessary to develop a strict security protocol approved by the Defense and Interior Ministries, the National Police and the State Emergency Service. The dispute of the meetings will be linked to the authorizations that must be issued by the military administrations of each of the regions where the activity will be scheduled.

All matches will be played behind closed doors and in stadiums equipped with anti-aircraft sirens and air-raid shelters.. If an alarm is triggered during a match, the game stops immediately and the players, members of the coaching staff and the referee team, and the personnel dedicated to the organization must go quickly to the shelter and remain there until the alarm goes away.

Currently, the approved stadiums are in kyiv and in the west of the country (Lviv, Lutsk, Uzhgorod), far from the areas most affected by the war. This will force clubs like Chornomorets Odessa, Dnipro and FK Oleksandriya to relocate their headquarters. It is not the first time this has happened, since since 2014, when the conflict in the Donbas region began, Zorya Luhansk (settled in Zaporizhia and will now play in Uzhhorod) and Shakhtar Donetsk (passed by Lviv and Kharkiv first to settle in Kiev).

16 teams will continue to participate in the tournamentbut two of the clubs that played last season will not be able to do so in this one. Desna Chernihiv, who was seventh when the last tournament was suspended, has announced her defection from the competition after the bombings severely damaged his stadium (once called Yuri Gagarin, by the famous Soviet cosmonaut) in Chernihiv, in the north of the country and a few kilometers from the border with Belarus. Neither will FC Mariupol, the city club located on the shores of the Azov Sea which is occupied by Russian troops, intervene.

The seats in these ensembles will be taken by the Metalist Kharkiv and Kryvbas Kryvyi Rig (from President Zelensky’s hometown), who were marching first and second in the Persha Liha, the second division race, when the war began. Kryvbas’ coach will be Yuriy Vernydub, who last season coached Moldova’s Sheriff Tiraspol (he beat Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabéu in the Champions League group stage) and resigned to enlist in the Ukrainian army. He now has special permission from the Ministry of Defense to divide his time between military activity and football.

One of the great challenges for the clubs, after more than eight months of hiatus, was to rearrange their teams. The war, of course, has alienated many players, especially foreigners. When the last tournament was suspended, 98 foreigners played in the 16 Premier League teams, while only 45 will start this championship. Among these, the largest crew continues to be, as it has been for years, that of the Brazilians: there will be nine.

And also there will be three Argentines. Domingo Blanco, who left Independiente on June 30, and Emiliano Purita (trained in San Lorenzo and with passes from Arsenal and San Martín de Tucumán) joined Dnipro and officially debuted with the new team on Thursday in the first leg. of one of the keys of the Europa League playoffs against AEK Larnaca from Cyprus. Meanwhile, missionary Fabricio Alvarenga, who has been in Ukraine for two years, is recovering from a torn cruciate ligament and will continue his career in Rukh Lviv.

In this time of hostility and fear, not all of them were desertions. In recent weeks there have been players who had left at the beginning of the conflict and are now back, such as Brazilian Marlyson (Vorskla Poltava) and Croatian Neven Djurasek (Shakhtar Donetsk), as well as others who had never played in this country and there have landed, like the Albanian Realdo Fili (Chornomorets), the Cameroonian Yvan Dibango (Kryvbas) and the Brazilian Felipe Rodrigues (Vorskla Poltava).