Kyiv hosted the Champions League final this year but chances that a Ukrainian team would be in it were always fairly remote. But if its two leading clubs, especially the Donetsk Shakhtar, nearly half of whose roster consists of Brazilian players, are quite successful, the national team has nothing to brag about.
It was quite different during the Soviet era.
When I was a kid in the Soviet Union, Ukraine was the cornerstone of Soviet soccer. The Kyiv Dynamo was a perennial USSR champion, and when for some reason it missed out on gold, it was a runner up. The club ended up as the most decorated in Soviet history. In 1961 it became the first club outside Moscow to win the national championship and in the subsequent thirty years it did it a total of thirteen times – nearly once every two years.
Besides the Dynamo, two other clubs from Ukraine became Soviet champions, the Luhansk Zorya and the Dnipropetrovsk Dnipro, which did it twice. And a very large number of national team players and coaches also came through the Ukrainian soccer system, at a time when the USSR achieved its pinnacle of success.
In the 19th century it was through Ukraine that soccer entered into the Russian Empire. British sailors brought it to the international port of Odesa while British and German mining engineers planted it in the coal-rich Donbas.
Odesa in fact became the first national champion of the Russian Empire, beating St. Petersburg in the final.
Equally early – much earlier than in the Russian parts of the Russian Empire – soccer became popular in Austria-Hungary, including in areas which are now comprise western parts of Ukraine.
In fact, nation-states that emerged following the Central Powers’ defeat in World War I were among the best teams in the early World Cups in the 1930s. They included Czechoslovakia, Austria, Romania and of course Hungary.
Hungary, which never won the World Cup, was the world’s strongest team in the mid-1950s. It revolutionized the game and invented the “total football” style of play. It may be overstating it but at least in part the glory of Ukrainian soccer was an outgrowth of Hungarian soccer. Ernest Yust was a Kyiv Dynamo player in the 1950s and later a highly successful coach of the Lviv Karpaty. Josef Sabo, one of the best Soviet midfielders of the 1960s, his partner in the Kyiv Dynamo Ferenz Medvid, a younger Karpaty and national team forward Vasyl (Laszlo) Rats were ethnic Hungarians from the west of Ukraine, from the lands Stalin occupied at the start of World War II.
(Romanian soccer also benefited from Hungarians from Transylvania in the interwar period, when it played in the World Cup tournaments.)
The Soviet invasion in 1956 and the defection of great Ferenc Puskas put an end to the Hungarian soccer success. The national team went into a gradual decline. Since the mid-1980s it has never been decent, much less dominant.
Curiously, Ukrainian soccer started to suffer a similar fate just about at the same time. Andriy Shevchenko notwithstanding, the overall level of the national team, and of individual players, has been middling, to say the least.
Once the tradition of producing top players is gone it is hard to revive it. Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, in an effort to spur Hundary’s flagging national greatness, has been promoting soccer once more. Hungary qualified for the 2016 European Championship but it seemed more like a flash in the pan.
Latin countries, as well as Africa, seem to thrive on tradition and enthusiasm of young boys and their fathers. In Europe, good players are produced thanks to a solid player development and, increasingly, advanced technology.
Some years ago, Belgium, previously not a great soccer power, invested into a nationwide program to grow soccer talent, taking advantage of the best practices around the world. It now has a pool of world-class players and it’s national team is one of the contenders for this year’s World Cup. But this of course requires a lot of money.
Countries like Ukraine and Hungary, despite their considerable past achievements, are falling in-between these two models. As long as rich Ukrainian oligarchs continue to gratify their nouveau-riches egos by buying foreign players for their top-flight teams, while the rest of the league is starved of funds and player development is neglected, Ukraine’s achievements in international soccer will be few and far between.
