The Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba spoke about his love for football and Dynamo Kyiv.
Dmytro Kuleba"Where did my love for football come from? From the Rapid vs Dynamo match in the Champions League qualifiers of the 1996/1997 season. I was not at the game. It was the first Dynamo match I ever watched. We lost and did not qualify for the Champions League. And I thought: "Wow. What's it like? No, no, no, that's it, come on, we have to support our own." At the time, I was living with my parents in Austria. Somehow it hit me - how could our team lose? We should always win.
And I started to get interested in football, and then I came back to Ukraine when that legendary generation of Dynamo players was playing. In 1998, when I entered the institute, I did not miss a single match in the Champions League. I made my way to the stadium. The most legendary is, of course, 2-0 against Real Madrid in the quarter-finals. I was crying, jumping, hitting my head, it was just... I was really living it. I bought the Komanda newspaper every day, read it all, collected what I couldn't buy, went begging for yesterday's issue, the Football magazine. I knew Dynamo back then, I think, up to the third team, I could tell you everything. But yes, my passion came from the pain of my team's defeat.
To be honest, I don't have time to watch football live now. Because I'm always at work and don't get to the matches. But if I have an hour and a half or less to spare, I sit down and can watch a good match on tape. Of course, after every game I go to YouTube and watch the match review. I don't follow it so deeply that I know everybody by name, up to the third team, but I'm still rooting for them.
By the way, I think that now Ukrainian football has a chance to rethink itself. We had a surge that lasted from the mid-90s to the early 2000s. But there was still a lot of Soviet football inertia, the system of education, selection, all these things were still working. Then we completely switched to legionnaires, which means that money started to rule football.
Now the war is bad, there is no money, and we see that the quality of football has dropped dramatically. But, on the other hand, I understand that now all the clubs, including Dynamo, are raking up all their schools because they are chasing these youngsters. But I think this is a chance - a chance to give birth to a new quality of football management in a crisis and a new quality of local players," Kuleba said in an interview with the Bombardier YouTube channel.
