Football on the frontline: Why Brazilian talents continue to flock to Shakhtar Donetsk despite Ukraine’s brutal war with Russia
Quite incredibly, the outbreak of war in Ukraine and the upheaval caused by their forced exile has not stopped Shakhtar being able to attract Brazilian prospects, and they reached a very significant milestone earlier this summer.
Flamengo’s Ryan Roberto remarkably became the 50th Brazilian player to sign for Shakhtar in their history when he completed a €9 million switch in July, which, pretty ridiculously, averages out at more than two per year since their samba-football recruitment drive began back in 2002. Bruninho, another highly-rated winger, has also joined from Athletico Paranaense following his 18th birthday for a pretty significant €11 million (£9m/$12m) fee.
It reflects that the city of Donetsk and, since 2014, this displaced football club really has become a Brazilian enclave 10,000km from home.
Explaining his decision, Roberto said: “I think one of the things that made me choose Shakhtar was the amount of Brazilians they have here. For having so many Brazilians and for having had many Brazilians before. It’s a club that knows how to receive well, and that’s what I heard before coming here. It is a club that is prepared to receive Brazilians, it knows how to deal with them.”
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, several foreign players exercised a newly-introduced FIFA rule to suspend their contracts with Shakhtar and subsequently cut ties, including star winger Tete, leading to them competing with a predominantly Ukrainian squad in 2022-23 and giving the likes of Mykhailo Mudryk a platform to shine as they still claimed the league title.
But in the summer of 2023, the club was in a position to resume it’s famed trading with Brazilian clubs. “Shakhtar won the league and essentially they started bringing in a couple more Brazilians just because they were able to convince them that it was safe enough to do so,” Todos explains. “From the different sources I’ve read, in order to be able to attract people to come to a warzone you have to pay them good wages as well to make it attractive.
“That community was rebuilding. Shakhtar are now based in Lviv, which is in the west of Ukraine, right near the border with Poland. So, it’s probably about an hour, an hour-and-a-half drive to the border and you cross the border, get on your flight from Poland and fly home, fly to Europe, wherever you want to go. Shakhtar were able to create this community again, they were just building gradually.”
Indeed, the club’s renowned connection with Brazil is going from strength to strength; at the time of writing, they have a record number of Brazilian players on their books with 14, despite the war in Ukraine seemingly having no end in sight.
