Ukrainian soccer season starts with Shakhtar’s Super Cup victory over Dynamo in Lviv

The 2014-2015 soccer season kicked off on July 22 in Lviv where Shakhtar Donetsk beat Dynamo Kyiv 2-0 in the Super Cup. Shakhtar was last season’s domestic league champion and Dynamo was the Ukraine Cup winner. 

The Premier League officially starts
on July 25 with Metalurg Donetsk facing Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk in Dniproderzhynsk.
Because of ongoing Russian military aggression in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts,
Metalurg Donetsk will play its home games in Dniproderzhynsk, Dnipropetrovsk
Oblast.

Zorya Luhansk will play its home
games in Zaporizhya, Olimpique Donetsk in Kyiv and Shakhtar in Lviv.

The venue of Illichivetsk Mariupol’s
home games will be determined in the near future –its first two Premier League fixtures
are away games.

This year’s Premier League will
feature 14 clubs instead of the usual 16. Crimean clubs Tavria Simferopol and
FC Sevastopol are unable to compete in Ukraine’s domestic league due to Russia’s
annexation of the peninsula. The format will be a double round-robin totaling
26 rounds ending on April 29, 2015.

The Ukraine Cup will be
single-elimination, single-legged games until the Round of 16, after which they
will transform to two-legged games.

Source: www.fpl.ua

As last year’s domestic league
champion, Shakhtar automatically qualified for the group stage competition of
UEFA’s Champions League. As runner-up, Dnipro will enter the preliminary stage
of Europe’s
most prestigious club tournament in the third qualifying round.

As the third place team from last
year, Dynamo automatically qualified for the group stage of UEFA’s Europa
League – a lower-tiered European tournament of soccer clubs. Metalist will attempt
to enter the group stage during the play-off contest, while Chornomorets Odesa
will start in the third qualifying round, followed by Zorya Luhansk in the
second qualifying round.

Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected].