Shakhtar Donetsk is today a nomadic club. A team without a home. The bombs have driven the footballers away from their place of origin in the south-east of Ukraine. So are their fans. Over there, in the Donbass, the ball hasn’t rolled there for nine years, the club exiled first to Kyiv, then to Lviv and Kharkiv, later to Warsaw and now to Hamburg. This year, they play their Champions League matches in Germany, a competition that serves this team and its patron, Rinat Akhmétov, to have international visibility.
The owner of this ghost club that is still standing, competing and winning against the odds despite the war, is the richest man in Ukraine. At least it was before the beginning of the invasion of Russia. According to Forbes, Akhmetov’s fortune dropped from $14 billion to less than $6,000 in just two weeks in 2022 after the start of the conflict. Today it will probably be much less.
Akhmétov (Donetsk, 1966) is the son of a Donetsk coal miner. There he was born, lived and built his fortune. From abject poverty, he managed to get a degree in Economics and started buying mining assets during the 1990s privatization era in Ukraine. Little by little, he worked his way up to being the owner of one of the most important holdings in Europe, System Capital Management (SCM). His businesses include telecommunications, engineering, finance, real estate, transport and retail, as well as his love club. In 2020, he boasted of having the most expensive mansion in the world, Villa Les Cedres, in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera, for which he paid 200 million euros.
A man with his power also had a lot of weight in the politics of the country, but as a member of the Party of the Regions of the Russophile Viktor Yanukovych, today he is called and wanted for high treason. After the outbreak of war, Akhmetov decided to support the unity of Ukraine and declared Putin a war criminal, although at first Zelenskii became hesitant about whether he would strike a blow in favor of the Russians. Once defined, he has thrown himself into the defense of his country, making financial contributions of millions of euros, both in humanitarian aid and in support of the Ukrainian armed forces, for which he has even built portable war shelters . In fact, the sale of Mudryk to Chelsea served to give another 25 million.
This safeguarding of his country has earned him a direct confrontation with Russia, which has seized all his assets and businesses in the country. Akhmetov has hit back with a lawsuit against the Kremlin at the European Court of Human Rights for what he says were between 17 billion and 20 billion dollars in losses as a result of the bombing of its steel mills in Mariupol.
The influence of this tycoon, turned warlord, has gone beyond the economic. In the most dramatic moments, he managed to mobilize a real army of workers with whom he provided help in several cities. In Mariúpol, he organized thousands of steel workers to restore order. These workers, with the miners, were deployed in five cities, including Donetsk, but failed to gain control in all of them.
In the meantime, and always without leaving Ukraine, he has continued to finance a team that FIFA has stripped of its players by decree (the club has sued the international body for this decision). Football players like David Neres, Marcos Antonio or Teté left for free or below their price. The bet for the Brazilians, implemented by Mircea Lucescu and which led them to shine in the Champions League, is gradually returning to the club. The full-back Pedrinho and the 18-year-old attackers Newerton, from São Paulo, and Eguinaldo, from Vasco da Gama, have returned the samba to the canarinha of the Champions.
