Shakhtar Donetsk plays Champions League home games in London — SkimNews
Get the Sports newsletter
Daily sports — scores, transfers, the storylines from the leagues you actually follow. Free.
- Shakhtar Donetsk will play their home Champions League matches at Chelsea's Stamford Bridge this season, beginning with AEK Athens on Wednesday, followed by visits from Real Madrid, Sporting and Fenerbahce.
- Shakhtar has been a displaced club since Russia's 2014 capture of Donetsk, using venues in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Poland, Slovenia and Germany over the past 14 years while continuing to run its academy and women's team inside Ukraine.
- Chief executive Sergei Palkin said the club's under-12 team was moved to a safer area of Kyiv following recent attacks and that a women's-team match was disrupted by a nearby drone strike, framing daily operations as 'much more than football.'
- Fans inside Ukraine face a £135 UK visa fee and a three-month application window that supporters call prohibitive, with one anonymous fan telling the BBC UK regulations are 'crazy' and beyond what most Ukrainians can manage.
- Previous Shakhtar visits to England — Crystal Palace in the Europa Conference League semi-final and Arsenal in the 2024-25 Champions League — saw the club's ticket allocation sell out in an hour, underscoring demand from the UK-based Ukrainian diaspora.
- The club plans community activities including school visits, training sessions with Ukrainian children in London and fundraising for supplies back home, with Palkin saying the games are meant to remind people 'what's going on' in Ukraine.
Why it matters: For the roughly 265,000 Ukrainians who took refuge in the UK, Shakhtar's Stamford Bridge run turns a Champions League campaign into a diaspora gathering for a club symbolizing Eastern Ukraine — yet the £135 visa cost and three-month wait cited by fans mean those inside Ukraine, not abroad, are largely locked out of attending in person.
Ask SkimNews
