Nobody in football has a job like Serhiy Balkin. As CEO of Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk, Balkin had to guide the company through a decade of crisis, disintegration and war, while crafting a team that could compete at the highest level of the game.
In early 2014, the club's home city of Donetsk became the front line as war broke out in the country's eastern Donbas region. Shakhtar was forced to move its entire operations to Kiev, a city that provides quick exit routes for many of the club's foreign players if necessary.
Due to a shortage of stadiums in the capital, the team's “home” matches were held across the country, including Lviv in the west and Kharkiv in the northeast. The upheaval marked a stark change for the club that had won the UEFA Cup five years earlier, and marked the opening of a new 52,000-capacity stadium with a live performance from Beyoncé. However, in the following years, he was crowned champion of Ukraine four times.
But in February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, everything stopped. Balkin faced his biggest crisis yet.
“When the war started, during the first week and a half, no one was thinking about football, everyone was thinking about how to survive,” Balkin said. “There were Russian helicopters over my house, and it was a complete nightmare. Bombing, bombing. “It was very difficult mentally, she couldn’t sleep at night and couldn’t sleep during the day.”
His first thought was about Shakhtar's international players, and how to get them out of the country safely. He gathered them in a hotel, locking himself in a room while he negotiated the movements of as many of them as possible. “The first mission was to get them out of Ukraine. Everyone understood that the most important thing is life, not football.
FIFA, soccer's governing body, quickly ruled that the contracts of all non-Ukrainian players would be suspended immediately, and the domestic league was suspended indefinitely. The club's focus shifted to providing shelter at the Lviv stadium for people taking refuge from the war, something Balkin said Shakhtar understood after spending many years as a “homeless team”.
“Then came the moment of clarity,” Balkin, 49, said. We realized we needed to play football. If we don't continue, Ukrainian football will die. Shakhtar began playing friendly matches, including a match against Greek side Olympiacos in April 2022 in which the games were placed on empty seats to symbolize the number of children killed during the war at that point.
Balkin said one of the club's primary goals is to tell Ukraine's story to people around the world. It is believed that football has a special power.
“When you stay inside Ukraine, you think you are alone,” he said, recalling the first weeks of the war. He added: “But when I saw the Premier League on TV, I saw these flags in support of Ukraine. You can't imagine the kind of emotional support you get from that.”
In the two years since the war began, he has gradually rebuilt the club, buying in Ukrainian footballers playing elsewhere in Europe – many of them graduates of the Shakhtar youth academy – and bringing back other players who were out of the country on loan. A new coach has been appointed with the sole aim of motivating a group of players who are all dealing with the personal traumas of war.
With no domestic football, all revenue from tickets, sponsorship and television rights immediately disappeared, so more international friendlies were arranged to help generate funds, while some of the team's best players were sold.
Mykhailo Modric moved to Chelsea in January last year for 70 million euros, while goalkeeper Anatoly Trubin moved to Benfica for 10 million euros. Among the current players, midfielder Georgi Sudakov is expected to make a big move this summer.
Despite the major disruption, the club performed well on the pitch, winning the domestic title when the Ukrainian league resumed last year. In the Champions League, Europe's top club competition, Shakhtar recorded memorable victories against RB Leipzig, one of Germany's richest clubs, and Spanish giants Barcelona.
The impressive results came despite the long road trip from Shakhtar's training base in Kiev to Hamburg, where they now play international home matches. Balkin said these matches helped break out of the negative news cycle in Ukraine and could remind people that “sometimes the impossible is possible.”
Transfer income, money from European matches and support from the club's billionaire owner, Ukrainian steel magnate Rinat Akhmetov, have allowed Shakhtar to start signing players again, with a few arriving last summer from South America. While the club is inevitably built on Ukrainian talent – Shakhtar's “golden anchor” – Balkin said it was essential to continue to draw on external expertise wherever possible in all areas of the business.
Balkin, an accountant by training, worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers and as a cement producer before arriving in Shakhtar for what he thought would be six months longer than he had 20 years ago. He soon found himself in the top job, and – alongside Akhmetov – developing what he calls Shakhtar's “brand essence”.
“At all times, I try to have Champions League standards – in everything – HR, strategy, commercial affairs, the IT department, our commercial company that sells the kits. Everything,” he said. “Today we have a very strong team. They have Shakhtar's DNA. They know where we come from, and what our requirements are. I need to explain the story to them. ”
It is believed that the firm spirit and strong executive team are what enabled the club to face such enormous challenges.
“Our management team, they have lived through many crises. “They are really crisis-resistant,” he said. “Creating this kind of team is 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, Balkin noted that things could change quickly in Ukraine. Current sponsors include a betting company, a low-cost airline and a chain of gas stations, all Ukrainian. The club wants to attract more international partners.
“We cannot plan for the long term. What we have is our tunnel, and we know that we will go in this direction, but we know every week that the situation can change.”
As for the big question of whether Shakhtar will return to its home city, now located in Russian-controlled territory, Balkin said: “It is our dream to return. I don’t know when it will happen, maybe it will take 10 or 15 years. I don’t know. But our dream “It is the return. One day all wars will end. So everything can change one day. We are waiting for the black swan that will change our history.”
