No games since Putin’s war
Ukrainian league canceled without a champion
4/27/2022 9:54 am
Hours after the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Premier Liha is suspended. The clubs take their players abroad to safety. There they prepare themselves for future tasks. However, a league operation is out of the question. The league is broken off two months after the start of the war.
The Ukrainian Premjer Liha is canceling its current season because of the Russian war of aggression – so there will be no football champion in 2022. All 16 clubs in the top division agreed to this decision, the UPL announced on Tuesday evening. The standings from February 24th are the final for the 2021/22 season. After 18 match days, series champion Shakhtar Donetsk (47 points) was ahead of Dynamo Kyiv (45).
A few hours after Russian troops attacked Ukraine on February 24, the Ukrainian football association UAF suspended the first division. The winter break of the Premjer Liha was originally supposed to end on February 25 with the game of relegation candidates FK Minaj against fourth-placed Sorja Luhansk. “Due to the imposition of martial law in Ukraine, the Ukrainian championship was suspended,” the UAF justified its decision a good two months ago.
Clubs like Sorja Luhansk or Shakhtar Donetsk, which come from the areas of eastern Ukraine that have been controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014, have not been training or playing in their home country for several years.
National team wants to qualify for the World Cup in June
However, because the Ukrainian national team is still scheduled to qualify for the World Cup in June, the national players who are under contract with local clubs are now gaining match practice in friendlies across Europe. Dynamo Kyiv played a game in Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion on Tuesday.
For the team, which has been keeping fit near Bucharest since the beginning of the war on the initiative of its Romanian coach Mircea Lucesu, the 3:2 victory in Dortmund was not only a charitable event but also a sporting endurance test. A total of eleven professionals are in the squad of the Ukrainian national team.