Shakhtar Donetsk CEO Speaks Of “Dream Of Going Home” As Ukraine’s Club And Economy Fight Through War

Soccer teams are used to challenges. Competing across continents brings with it all kinds of tests of ability on the field and business skill off it, but few have faced obstacles the size of those faced by Shakhtar Donetsk. Forced out of their $400 million stadium in 2014 when Russia annexed the region of Donetsk, they seek a new temporary home each year to compete among the game’s elite at the highest level.

Few are better positioned to pay testimony to that than CEO Serhii Palkin, who has held the role since 2004, for 10 years in normal circumstances and 12 in exile, and Maxim Timchenko, CEO of partners and energy giants DTEK, who will back Shakhtar with their logo on their sleeve, while main sponsor SCM carry the message of “Invest in Ukraine” emblazoned on jerseys. This season, they return to the UEFA Champions League, but will do so 2,000 miles away from home, at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge in London, using it as a temporary home.

Sitting down with executives from Shakhtar Donetsk and their partners DTEK in London, there were away jerseys everywhere, in every photo opportunity, being handed out to partners in meetings, and yet there was not a single home jersey in the room. The reason was simple, a representative explained. In early August, a Russian ballistic attack wiped out PUMA’s logistics warehouse near Kyiv which housed the supply of fan jerseys and left the team with limited stock to play in.

In the scale of a war, a batch of jerseys is the least of Shakhtar’s worries. Palkin explains that running a club in wartime and running one in peacetime are “completely different worlds”, pointing to how before the war, Shakhtar made money the way most big European clubs do. “We had many sources of income, like ticketing, sponsors, partnerships, broadcasts,” Palkin says. “Now we lost all this. We have just two sources of income: sales of players and bonuses from UEFA.”

That has dictated the club’s strategy. Famed for their attacking soccer and Brazilian flair, featuring the likes of Fernandinho and Willian who would later star in the Premier League, in their runs in Europe, winning the UEFA Cup in 2009 and reaching the Champions League quarterfinals in 2011, Shakhtar have always prioritized bringing through young talents and selling them on, but even that approach has been forced to shift.

London represents the latest step, and begins when Shakhtar take on Greek side AEK Athens on Wednesday, October 14th, in their first game at their British temporary home.

A home away from home

The exile from Donetsk is now 12 years old. Shakhtar’s last match at the Donbas Arena was on May 2, 2014, after which the club played its domestic home games in Lviv, Kharkiv and Kyiv. Since 2022, Ukrainian league matches have continued behind closed doors.

Its European home games have moved almost every year. Shakhtar played in Warsaw in 2022/23, Hamburg in 2023/24, Gelsenkirchen in 2024/25 and Krakow in 2025/26. Stamford Bridge, available because Chelsea failed to qualify for Europe this season, is the latest stop.

Shakhtar plays its first home game of this season’s Champions League against AEK Athens at Stamford Bridge on 14 October. London is the club’s latest temporary home. Shakhtar left Donetsk in 2014, and since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 it has played its European home games abroad, first in Poland and then in Germany.

It hasn’t stopped the Ukrainians from competing with the best. In May, they were beaten by eventual UEFA Conference League champions Crystal Palace in the semifinals of the competition, the closest that any Ukrainian side has come to continental success since they won the UEFA Cup in 2009.

Two sources of income

At most big European clubs, matchday, commercial and broadcast income carry the business. Shakhtar has almost none of the first, with domestic games played to empty stands and European home games staged in borrowed stadiums abroad. Its commercial and broadcast value has shrunk with its profile at home.

Even so, the figures are bigger than the circumstances suggest. Palkin says Shakhtar’s income reached up to $400 million across the four seasons since the invasion. “Having in mind that we have war in our country, these are quite good results,” he says. “It’s helping us to survive from a financial point of view.”

Crucial to that was a third route, sponsorships and partnerships, now largely with Ukrainian companies. Many options were diminished in some senses but Shakhtar has been able to rely on the support of core partners like DTEK, who have invested heavily in energy infrastructure and have a strong partnership with the club, both forming part of owner Rinat Akhmetov’s SCM Group.

The UEFA side of that equation is easy to measure. Every club in the Champions League league phase receives a starting fee of €18.62 million ($21.4 million), plus €2.1 million ($2.4 million) per win and €700,000 ($805,000) per draw. That makes this season a big step up. Shakhtar spent 2025/26 in the Conference League, where it reached the semi-finals but where a league-phase win is worth €400,000 ($460,000), a fifth of what is on offer this season.

It came after Shakhtar won the Ukrainian title last season, for the third time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine halted the season in 2022. That victory qualified them straight into the Champions League league phase, in a league played behind closed doors for safety reasons. They are now coached by Arda Turan, best known for days at Atlético Madrid and Barcelona in his playing days, he told Sky Sports of the unique challenges of leading Shakhtar, saying, “at a regular club, you can go back to your house a few hours after a trip, but here, it is not like that. Sometimes it takes more than a day and you can only start working again after 48 hours.”

The Mudryk benchmark

Developing talent remains at the heart of Shakhtar’s philosophy. The clearest example is Mykhailo Mudryk, who joined Chelsea in January 2023 for €70 million ($80.5 million) up front and up to €30 million ($34.5 million) in bonuses. Palkin calls it the biggest sale in Ukrainian soccer history.

“If you’re selling a player for €100 million ($114 million) during wartime, for us it’s a big change,” he says. The sale doubled as a public statement. Akhmetov immediately put $25 million of the proceeds into Heart of Azovstal, a fund for soldiers and their families, CNN reported.

Shakhtar built its reputation on young Brazilians such as Willian, Fernandinho and Fred, who arrived cheaply and were later sold on for large fees. Palkin says that know-how has survived the war. “We know how to bring in players, develop them and sell them to top European leagues,” he says.

The war initially broke that pipeline as, after the invasion, FIFA let foreign players in Ukraine suspend their contracts, and most of Shakhtar’s Brazilians left for nothing. The club sought at least €50 million ($57.5 million) in compensation from FIFA over what Palkin described as an “unfair” ruling, according to the BBC. It forced a change to focus more heavily on homegrown Ukrainian talents, while retaining the flare of their imports with players like current top scorers and Brazilian duo Luca Meirelles and Kauã Elias.

The deals since have followed a pattern of smaller fees with long-term benefits for the club and the players themselves. Goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin joined Benfica for €10 million ($11.5 million), which may seem less impressive, but Shakhtar keep 40% of any future sale, A Bola reported. Midfielder Heorhii Sudakov followed him to Lisbon in 2025 on a €6.75 million ($7.8 million) loan with an obligation to buy for €20.25 million ($23.3 million), and Shakhtar kept a 25% sell-on clause, claims Ukrainska Pravda.

What has changed is the age profile as Palkin says Shakhtar has the youngest squad in the Champions League, fielding players aged 19 and 20. “It’s our strategy and we know how to manage it,” he says, pointing to the talented young players in his squad and the promising coach in Turan.

Planning one day at a time

“The biggest challenge we have at this moment is uncertainty,” Palkin says. “You cannot plan even for one day, for two days. I’m not talking about years.” That uncertainty is why the Champions League matters so much to the model with UEFA money now one of Shakhtar’s two remaining income streams, and the competition is also the shop window for the other one. “We need to show very good, attractive football,” Palkin says. “For us it’s very important to be visible on this stage.”

Mudryk is the template of how Shakhtar can generate revenue from the platform. He scored three goals in the 2022/23 Champions League group stage and within months Chelsea and Arsenal were bidding against each other for him. A run in this season’s league phase does the same job for the next generation, in front of every scout in Europe.

The importance of that style goes well beyond money. Palkin describes attacking style as the club’s “DNA” and says effort matters more than any single result. “We can even lose, but give our 100% on the pitch,” he insists. “For people sitting in Ukraine and watching a Ukrainian club playing on this level, it’s unbelievably important,” he says.

Particularly in London, that matters. Palkin explains that, “a lot of Ukrainian refugees live there, so in the end, we have a good connection with all our diaspora and I believe all of them will come to our games, to our stadium, which means it’s very important to have this kind of connection with people living in England and, for them, our club is like a connection to Ukraine, and this is the most important thing”.

The long-term owner, Rinat Akhmetov

Behind all of this is Rinat Akhmetov, who has owned Shakhtar since 1996. His investment group, SCM, lost major industrial assets to the war, including the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, which belonged to its mining and metals arm, Metinvest.

The links between club and group run deep as SCM has been Shakhtar’s title and front-of-shirt sponsor since 2006, according to the group’s media kit. SCM says its businesses have invested more than $4.3 billion in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion, and it describes Shakhtar as the platform that carries that story to international audiences.

Palkin is blunt about how much the club relies on him. He calls Akhmetov “an architect of our strategy” and says the club is “part of his soul”. He also points to how rare that kind of commitment is. “If you check owners of clubs who stay more than 30 years, maybe you will find three or four guys in the world,” he says.

DTEK on the shirt

This season, Akhmetov’s energy company DTEK is on Shakhtar’s Champions League shirt for the first time, alongside an “Invest in Ukraine” message. Maxim Timchenko, DTEK’s chief executive since 2005, is from Donetsk. He says his family had “no other choice” but to support Shakhtar. Of DTEK’s 55,000 employees, he says most back the club “not because of corporate rules, but by heart”. He explains that, “Shakhtar is Ukrainian for ‘coal mine’, so, from the beginning of DTEK, 21 years ago, we were of course part of football, because of coal mining and Shakhtar”.

He does not call the shirt deal a sponsorship. “It’s partnership,” he says. “Thanks to Shakhtar and the president of Shakhtar, we have such outreach and access to hundreds of millions of people.” Timchenko says DTEK has invested €2.4 billion ($2.7 billion) since the full-scale invasion, repairing what Russian attacks destroyed and building new projects. That figure is more than any other company, foreign or domestic, since war began in 2022. Timchenko describes DTEK as probably the Ukrainian energy company that has suffered most from those attacks.

The company’s own figures show the scale of that damage. According to DTEK data, Russian attacks have damaged 80–90% of its thermal generation capacity over four consecutive winters. Its grid business distributes 40% of Ukraine’s electricity, and 484 of its employees have been killed at work or while serving in the armed forces.

The point of the campaign, he says, is to change the conversation from aid to investment. “We need to move from words of support to real actions.”

The road home

Timchenko sees the two businesses in the same position. “Shakhtar is already playing Champions League,” he says. “I think DTEK, to some extent, is among the Champions League of energy companies of Europe,” pointing to the role that they can play in helping the club in their journey home.

When Mudryk left for Chelsea in 2023, Akhmetov said Shakhtar would one day play a friendly against Chelsea at the Donbas Arena. Three years on, Shakhtar is playing its home games at Chelsea’s stadium instead.

Palkin describes the way home in stages. The first is bringing European soccer back to Ukraine, and the second is a return to Donetsk and the Donbas Arena, which the club left 12 years ago.

“We believe in this,” Palkin insists, with the determination of a man who has led an organization through the kind of challenges that nobody saw coming when he took on the role. “It’s difficult to live without a dream. Having this kind of dream gives you the resources to survive, to develop, to compete and to be ready to return one day back to Donetsk.”

This article was originally published on Forbes.com