DONETSK/KIEV (dpa) – If Ukraine’s national team played football as well as the owners of Dynamo Kyiv and Donetsk Shakhtar traded insults, the World Cup would long have been in Ukrainian hands.
On the one side of Ukraine’s biggest sporting rivalry stands Hryhory Surkis, an oil and chemical tycoon. Political analysts account him the country’s most powerful oligarch, closely linked to President Leonid Kuchma.
Surkis – a sports enthusiast with good looks strikingly similar to a buff Michael Douglas – bought Dynamo Kyiv in the early 1990s. He invested heavily, developing strikers Andri Schevchenko and Serhy Rebrov, and hiring legendary Soviet trainer Vladimir Lobanovsky. As late as 1999 the side was a force to be reckoned with Europe.
But Surkis gutted the club in 2000, selling “Sheva” and other top Dynamo performers abroad for, according to Ukrainian media estimates, around 20 million dollars – a huge sum by Ukrainian standards.
This year, a hodge-podge Dynamo of veterans, youngsters, East Europeans and African imports failed to win a single game in Champion’s League qualification.
And in Ukrainian league play, once-mighty Dynamo is, at the winter midseason break, in a formerly unheard-of tie for first.
Which brings us to Rinat Akhmetov, a hard-talking, dark-haired man from Donetsk with a penchant for expensive suits – and football.
Akhmetov – naturally – became President of Donetsk Shakhtar after making his pile in the steel and coal businesses. Like Surkis, he invested heavily in his club, among other purchases reportedly shelling out a Ukrainian record five million dollars for a Nigerian striker.
Shakhtar is the team even with Dynamo right now, For the first time in years the national championship, and glittering prize of Champion’s League television income, is up for grabs in Ukraine.
But the intense Akhmetov-Surkis rivalry has not improved Ukrainian football – onlya worsened it, most sports commentators say.
Akhmetov agrees, among other things accusing Surkis of abusing his position as head of the Ukrainian Football Federation (UFF) to secure pro-Kiev judging. The Donetsk boss accuses UFF judges of being flat unwilling to cite violations in Dynamo’s penalty box.
“If a team cannot score its own goals it shouldn’t have the judges do their scoring for them,” Akhmetov stormed after a particularly questionable call reduced a Dynamo opponent to 10 players.
Surkis calls Akhmetov’s allegations “emotional” and “unethical”. Nevertheless at an UFF meeting earlier this month the Kiev oligarch conceded too many Ukrainian football judges took bribes.
But even if the judges were clean, the playing field in Ukrainian football still would hardly be level.
Ukraine’s only fully-equipped football training facilities belong to Dynamo and Shakhtar. Some 90 per cent of all foreign football hires in Ukraine (excepting former Soviet republics like Russia or Latvia), work for either Akhmetov or Surkis.
In some Ukrainian teams players go without pay for months. In Kiev and Donetsk, top footballers are literally among the best-compensated workers in the entire country: living in houses, driving in cars, and even going on vacations all financed by the team.
The result has been a dichotomy in Ukrainian football, with Donetsk and Kiev fighting for the top spot, and the rest of the field fighting for third place. Mid-level teams openly go for ties when playing Surkis’ or Akhmetov’s rich sides, with play taking place almost wholly on one end of the field.
With some of the judges on the take, most stadiums in poor repair, and the championship winners narrowed down to two, fan attendance is unsurprisingly down.
As a result, appearing before a large – never mind hostile – crowd is a rare event for most Ukrainian footballers, as proved (in part) by Ukraine’s disastrous 4-1 showing against Germany in Dortmund during World Cup qualification.
Another cash disaster in Ukrainian football, sportswriters like Artem Omelyanko say, is youth football. The few talented young footballers there are wind up quickly in Shakhar or Dynamo farm teams, leaving the rest of the teams short of material for the future.
Surkis earlier this year pushed laws through parliament making football mandantory in the national schools system, at one point donating 50,000 footballs for the project only to have physical education teachers publicly declare they would rather just receive their paychecks on time.
All the woes of Ukrainian football these days – the corrupt judges, split-level league play, the shortage of youngsters, comes down to the fact Ukraine is a poor country, so most Ukrainian fans simply don’t have cash to support teams, experts said.
“The level of play is falling, and without more money invested in football we cannot expect to halt the trend,” Kommanda newspaper editorialised.
Surkis argued a recent UFF meeting the level of Ukrainian football could increase by dint of hard work and “discipline”. Akhmetov boycotted the conference.
