Nobody in football has a job quite like Serhii Palkin. As chief executive of Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk, Palkin has had to lead the business through a decade of crisis, dislocation and war, while putting out a team that can compete at the game’s highest level.
In early 2014, the club’s home city of Donetsk became the front line as war erupted in the country’s eastern Donbas region. Shakhtar was forced to relocate its entire operation to Kyiv, a city offering swift exit routes if needed for the club’s numerous foreign players.
Due to a shortage of stadiums in the capital, the team’s “home” matches took place across the country, including in Lviv in the west and Kharkiv in the north east. The upheaval was a stark change for a club that had won the Uefa Cup five years earlier, and had marked the opening of a new 52,000-seater stadium with a live performance from Beyoncé. Still, in the following years it was crowned Ukrainian champion four times.
But in February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, everything stopped. Palkin faced by far his biggest crisis yet.
“When the war started, for the first one and a half weeks, nobody thought about football, everybody thought about how to survive,” said Palkin. “Above my house I had Russian helicopters, it was a complete nightmare. Bombing, bombing. It was very difficult mentally — you couldn’t sleep at night and you couldn’t sleep in the day.”
His first thought was for Shakhtar’s international players, and how to get them out of the country safely. He gathered them in a hotel, and shut himself in a room while he negotiated moves for as many of them as possible. “Task number one was to bring them out of Ukraine. Everybody understood that the most important thing is lives, not football.”
Soon Fifa, football’s governing body, ruled that all non-Ukrainian players would have their contracts immediately suspended, and the domestic league was halted indefinitely. The club’s focus turned to providing shelter in the Lviv stadium for people seeking refuge from the war , something Palkin said Shakhtar understood after spending so many years as a “homeless team”.
Then came a moment of clarity, said Palkin, 49. “We realised that we needed to play football. If we don’t continue, Ukrainian football will die.” Shakhtar began playing friendly matches, including one against Greek side Olympiacos in April 2022 at which toys were placed on empty seats to symbolise the number of children who had been killed during the war at that point.
Palkin said one of the club’s core purposes became telling Ukraine’s story to people around the world. Football, he believes, has a special power.
“When you stay inside Ukraine you think you are alone,” he said, recalling the early weeks of the war. “But when I found the Premier League on TV, I saw these flags in support of Ukraine. You cannot imagine the kind of emotional support you get from that.”
In the two years since the war began, he has gradually rebuilt the club, by buying Ukrainian footballers playing elsewhere in Europe — many of them products of Shaktar’s youth academy — and bringing home others who had been out on loan. A new coach was hired with the sole aim of motivating a group of players all dealing with the personal traumas of the war.
With no domestic football, all income from tickets, sponsorship and television rights immediately vanished, so more international friendlies were arranged to help generate cash, while some of the team’s best players were sold.
Mykhaylo Mudryk went to Chelsea FC in January last year for €70mn, while goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin moved to Benfica for €10mn. Of the current crop, midfielder Georgiy Sudakov is tipped for a big move this summer.
Despite the huge disruption, the club has performed well on the pitch, winning the domestic title when the Ukrainian league restarted last year. In the Uefa Champions League, European football’s top club contest, Shakhtar has scored memorable wins against RB Leipzig, one of Germany’s richest clubs, and Spanish giants Barcelona.
Impressive results have come despite the long overland journey from Shakhtar’s training base in Kyiv to Hamburg, where it now plays international “home” games. These matches have helped provide a break from the cycle of negative news in Ukraine, and can remind people that “sometimes the impossible is possible”, said Palkin.
Transfer income, money from European matches and support from the club’s billionaire owner, Ukrainian steel tycoon, Rinat Akhmetov, have allowed Shakhtar to start signing players again, with a handful of arrivals last summer from South America. While the club is unavoidably built on Ukrainian talent — Shakhtar’s “golden anchor” — Palkin said it was vital to keep tapping expertise from abroad whenever possible in all areas of the business.
When you create a strong team, it can overcome any problem and reach all goals
An accountant by training, Palkin previously worked at PwC and a cement producer before arriving at Shakhtar for what he thought would be six months more than 20 years ago. He soon found himself in the top job and — along with Akhmetov — developed what he calls the Shakhtar “brand essence”.
“At all times, I try to have Champions League standards — in everything — HR, strategy, commercial, the IT department, our trading company that sells kits. Everything,” he said. “Today we have a very strong team. They have our Shakhtar DNA. They know where we are from, what requirements we have. I don’t need to explain the story to them.”
It is that long-ingrained ethos and a strong executive team, he believes, that has enabled the club to withstand such immense challenges.
“Our team of directors, they lived through many crises. They are crisis-proof already”, he said. “To create this kind of team, it’s the role of all CEOs. When you create a strong team, it can overcome any problem and reach all goals.”
Regarding the future of the club, Palkin noted that things can change quickly in Ukraine. Current sponsors include a betting company, a low-cost airline and a chain of petrol stations, all of which are Ukrainian. The club would like to attract more international partners.
“We cannot plan long-term. What we have is our tunnel — we know that we will go this way, but every week we know the situation can change.”
As for the big question of whether Shakhtar will ever return to its home city, now in Russian-controlled territory, Palkin said: “It’s our dream to go back. I don’t know when it will happen, maybe it will take 10 years, 15 years. I don’t know. But it’s our dream to return. One day, all wars finish. Therefore everything can change one day. We’re waiting for a black swan to change our history.”