TALKING FOOTBALL - Shakhtar Donetsk, the club longing to return home to the Donbass Arena

Shakhtar Donetsk are a club with a home away from home. We learn about their story having been displaced 600 miles away from the Donbass Arena, and how it has affected them.

Sunday marked the sixth anniversary of the Donbass Arena, the 52,000 seater UEFA five-star venue which staged England’s games against France and Ukraine in Euro 2012. The impressive, glass-fronted stadium was built to stage the home games of Shakhtar Donetsk, yet when Ukraine’s most successful modern club host Paris Saint Germain in the Champions League on Wednesday night, they’ll do so 600 miles west of the city which takes their name.

War has pushed Shakhtar into an indefinite exile since July 2014, shortly after six of their foreign players refused to return to Donetsk for fear of their safety. The club president and oligarch Rinat Akhmetov told them that they “had nothing to fear” and claimed the players were agitating for a move, but one, Douglas Costa retorted on his Instagram page: “We want to stay at the club, but we must have risk-free working conditions.”

Shakhtar knew they couldn’t play games in a city at war, with the front line close to their stadium, airport and modern training ground. The club had long looked west for players and their squad has included a significant number of Brazilians. Now they’d look west to survive, for predominantly Russian speaking Donetsk is in separatist hands, with the club’s administration shifted to a hotel in Kiev, where the players now live and train.

They fly into Lviv for matches, the venue chosen after the players responded favourably to the atmosphere in the 34,000 Arena Lviv in the 2014 Ukrainian Super Cup against Dynamo Kiev, themselves long perceived as the standard bearer for Ukrainian football.

The Lviv arena was built for Euro 2012 but the intended host team, FC Karpaty Lviv left after only one season, reluctant to pay the rent for a stadium that was too big for their needs. Shakhtar filled the void and a month after they reluctantly moved, the Donbass was hit by artillery shelling as the Ukrainian armed forces clashed with pro-Russian separatists for control of Ukraine’s fifth biggest city.

The Donbass was hit by shelling again in October 2014, when shockwaves shattered a large pain of glass, which fell and narrowly missed a young girl. “We are warning residents not to approach the stadium as it might be unsafe,” the Arena’s manager Vadyn Gunko told the BBC.

Though a truce has been signed, Shakhtar are still playing in Lviv, with the badly damaged Donbass now used as a depot for humanitarian aid for those suffering in the conflict, with club president Akhmetov helping the relief efforts.

In going west, Shakhtar left behind their fanbase, their community, their people. But it wasn’t safe to stay.

“In one day we lost everything,” the club’s CEO Sergei Palkin told the Guardian. “We lost one of the best stadiums in the world, we lost our training camp, but the most important thing was that we lost our fans. It’s difficult to stay without fans, to play without fans and to live without fans.”

Despite ticket prices starting at £1.40 (and £4 for the visits of PSG and Real Madrid) crowds in Lviv were often just a couple of thousand and even then many of the locals preferred the visiting teams to win. Most people in western Ukraine didn’t expect to see top-class football again any time soon after Euro 2012, but the Champions League brought it back via Shakhtar. Yet while the locals filled the stadium in Lviv, many wanted visiting foreign sides like Bayern Munich to win.

From playing in one of the most febrile, passionate arenas in world football in Donetsk, where the ultras unfurled a giant flag of a miner – the club’s nickname ‘the pitmen’ denotes their history of being founded by miners - when they played Manchester United in 2013, they now play where many don’t even want them.

Not everyone in Lviv supports Shakhtar’s opponents, but PSG can expect an easier ride on Wednesday night against a team for whom the constant flights and travelling took their toll. The team who’d won the league eight times in the last decade and for five successive seasons up to 2014, didn’t win the title in 2015. They did better in Europe, qualifying from their group stage last season, when striker Luiz Adriano equalled both Lionel Messi’s record of five goals in a Champions League match and Cristiano Ronaldo’s record of scoring nine goals in the group stage.

Star players continued to be sold, Adriano left for AC Milan in 2015 and Douglas Costa left for Bayern Munich, but Shakhtar’s business model had long been a successful and based around selling star Brazilians like Manchester City’s Fernandinho and Chelsea’s Willian.

Until the war, Shakhtar had been a success. With their Ukrainian-Brazilian mix of players, they became only the second Ukrainian club to win a European trophy, the 2009 UEFA Cup. They were Champions League regulars and ahead of the game against United in 2013, I spoke to the former Arsenal striker Eduardo who played for Shakhtar.

“We have big crowds at home and a beautiful stadium: 30,000 watch most of our league games, 50,000 see the Champions League,” explained the Rio de Janiero-born Croatian international. “The league stops in December when the temperature can drop to minus 10 or minus 15. We played Porto (in 2011) and it was minus eight. It gets even colder in January and February, that’s why we don’t play.”

It didn’t seem a natural fit for a Brazilian.

“It’s true that the culture is very different but we have a lot of Brazilian players here, not just at Shakhtar but at other clubs in Ukraine,” he said. “We socialise together, especially in the summer when the weather is hot in the summer. We enjoy BBQs together. In the winter, we stay inside and watch TV.”

It wasn’t only Brazilians, of whom nine remain in the Shakhtar squad playing under 70-year-old Romanian coach Mircea Lucescu, in charge since 2004. While Lucescu loved emerging Brazilian forwards, a large number of Spaniards play in Ukraine, where they’ll be better paid than in Spain. Jordi Cruyff was one of the first to move, in 2006 when he joined Metalurh Donetsk, the city’s second team until the war meant they went bankrupt in 2015.

“I like strange countries,” Cruyff explained. “I was going to play in Jordan, but went instead to Ukraine, where the football isn’t bad and I was treated well there. I enjoyed two years before returning home to Barcelona to be with my family.”

As with other displaced teams from eastern Ukraine from Donetsk, Luhansk and Mariupol, Shakhtar want to go home themselves, but with the east of of the country still under the control of pro-Russian forces, now is not the time. Many of the residents in the city of two million (though more than a million people have been displaced from the region) have bigger priorities than football, yet sport can sometimes transcend boundaries and be a refuge when everything else is bleak.