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Ukraine’s top football team is seeking to capitalise on recent successes in the Uefa Champions League to help it build a global following and attract more international sponsors.
FC Shakhtar Donetsk will face Portuguese side Porto in the final group stage game of this year’s Champions League on Wednesday evening. Victory would put the Ukrainian team into the knockout stages of the lucrative pan-European tournament, following recent wins over Antwerp and a memorable triumph over Spanish champions Barcelona last month.
With income from domestic football reduced to almost nothing since Russia’s invasion in February last year, the 14-time Ukrainian champion team has been working with its Switzerland-based advisers LTT Sports to grow its profile overseas, with the aim of attracting international commercial partners.
“Sponsorship disappeared. Tickets, zero. TV, zero,” said Serhii Palkin, Shakhtar chief executive, of the impact of the war. “Step by step we started to relaunch our club. We realised we needed to switch to the European market for revenue.”
Shakhtar, which is owned by Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, was forced to leave its home city of Donetsk in 2014 after Russian proxies took control of the city in eastern Ukraine, initially moving to Lviv in the country’s west, then to Kharkiv and finally to the capital, Kyiv. For its European games, the club has made Hamburg its home city for this season, with each match attracting more than 45,000 fans.
“We want to show fans that we can give them good results and show them attractive football,” said Palkin.
Shakhtar will play a friendly in Japan later this month, following similar exhibition matches in the summer against Tottenham Hotspur, AEK Athens and Ajax Amsterdam. While the proceeds from these games have been donated to help those affected by the war in Ukraine, they have also served to raise awareness of the conflict.
The club was recently the subject of a fly-on-the-wall documentary charting its fortunes during the first few months of the war, which aired on Paramount Plus in the US in September.
“All these things we are doing abroad, we need to absorb as much as possible from this,” said Palkin. “But we cannot plan long-term. Every week the situation can change.”
Since Russia’s invasion, Shakhtar has become almost totally reliant on income from European competitions and player trading. Teams in the group stages of the Champions League are guaranteed to earn at least €15mn, plus €2.8mn for each win. Qualifying for the knockout stages would bring another €9.6mn. Shakhtar has also made about €3mn in profit from ticket sales from its three Champions League games in Hamburg.
The club has a strong record in developing talented young players and selling them on for large fees. In January, winger Mykhailo Mudryk moved to Chelsea for €70mn, while this summer goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin went to Benfica for €10mn. The club is also in talks to sell Georgiy Sudakov during the January transfer window.
A handful of European football clubs, both large and small, have successfully gained a global following through savvy marketing campaigns. US-owned Venezia in Italy’s Serie B has presented itself to social media users as a hipster fashion brand, while Wrexham’s Hollywood owners have attracted a large US fan base to a club playing in the fourth tier of English football thanks to the Disney television show Welcome to Wrexham.
Palkin said Shakhtar was also talking to clubs in Saudi Arabia about potential collaboration, such as helping set up youth academy’s in the Gulf kingdom.
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