The well-known journalist Mykola Nesenyuk spoke about the growing sympathy of Ukrainian fans for the Spanish club Girona, where two Ukrainian legionnaires - Viktor Tsygankov and Artem Dovbyk - are currently playing.
Nikolay Nesenyuk"In the early 2000s, a huge number of Ukrainian football fans were allegedly sincerely rooting for Italian side AC Milan. There was a good reason for this: Andriy Shevchenko, a Kyivan who had joined AC Milan from Dynamo Kyiv, started playing for this Italian team. From the very first matches for the new team, Shevchenko began to score goals and later became the undisputed leader of the famous club, winning the Champions Cup and the Golden Ball for the best footballer in the world. With each new season, the number of Ukrainian "fans" of the Italian club grew and it seemed that there would be no end to it.
But there was an end. And it was quite predictable. As soon as the Ukrainian Shevchenko stopped playing in Italy, the number of the above-mentioned "fans" began to fall rapidly, and within a couple of years these "fans" disappeared from the horizon. Everything seems to be logical: no Shevchenko - no love!
But if you think about it, it becomes obvious that Ukrainian football "fans", at least the majority of them, were ready to become fans of any team for which a Ukrainian would play and which would win European trophies. If Shevchenko had joined Liverpool or Bayern Munich instead of AC Milan in 1999, they would have all become "fans" of the aforementioned teams.
I will say more, if Andriy had joined Spartak Moscow (why not - in the late nineties we were very good friends with the c@ts@ps), we would have had several million "fans" of the aforementioned team. Of course, these are all assumptions. To check them, we need either a time machine (which is impossible) or a new Andriy Shevchenko (which is almost impossible).
So, in the absence of a player of Shevchenko's calibre, or at least close to it, our 'fans' have not had the opportunity to change their colours en masse to those of a foreign team. Until this season, no Ukrainian playing abroad had become the undisputed leader of his team, although there were hopes for that.
It seemed that the story of "our AC Milan" could be forgotten as a sad curiosity of quite some time ago. Suddenly, Ukrainian Artem Dovbyk started scoring goals for Spanish side Girona. A team that most Ukrainian football fans had never heard of before. And it has begun - Girona, which is unexpectedly successful in the current Spanish championship, has made the headlines in Ukrainian sports and not only sports publications. It won't be long before we see a repeat of the Milan story of twenty years ago. If so, it will not be a repeat of that story, but a parody of it. And not just because today's Girona is to that Milan as Dovbyk was to Shevchenko. But because our people are not interested in football today," Neseniuk wrote on his Facebook page.
