Ruslan Rotan's coaching staff has completed its work with the youth/Olympic teams of Ukraine, and we can summarize this era.
A very successful era - both in terms of results (especially in its second part) and the number of interesting players whom the coaches singled out among others and gave the opportunity to develop their talent while receiving high-quality international practice. Many of them are either already in the national team or on their way to it.
But it is worth talking about players who have been trained for the main team of the country in the youth or junior national teams not immediately, but in 5-10-15 years - when you can assess the quality at a distance. But the statistical results can be compared right here and now.
And we can see that Ruslan Rotan shares second or third place in the historical ranking with Serhiy Kovalets in terms of the number of matches he has played as a youth national team manager: both have 47 games. However, Rotan still has 11 matches at the head of the Olympic team, which are listed in a separate app. Only Pavlo Yakovenko has managed the youth national team of Ukraine more - 92 games.
And even though in 17 cases the team was directly managed by an assistant delegated by Yakovenko (Hennadii Lytovchenko, Oleh Kuznetsov or Yurii Moroz), since at that time there were actually two youth national team squads that played matches in parallel, Pavlo Oleksandrovych's leadership in this rating is still unconditional.
Oleksiy Mykhailychenko (42 matches) and Oleksandr Holovko (37) are also in the top 5 of the rating.
In general, in the history of the youth national team of Ukraine there have been only 11 full-time coaches plus a group of specialists who at some time led in several games, performing temporary functions.
Only these 11 coaches participated in official tournaments. Only five of them took the youth national team to the playoffs, three to the final tournament, and two to medals in the final round. And only one managed to qualify for the Olympic Games.
In terms of the number of official tournament matches with the youth national team, Ruslan Rotan (27) is second only to Pavlo Yakovenko (31). If we add three games at the 2024 Olympics, the difference will be minimal (30-31). But let's not forget that Yakovenko has twice led the youth national team...
|
Coach |
Qualifying tournaments |
Final tournaments |
Total |
|
Group stage |
Playoffs |
||||
1 |
Pavlo Yakovenko |
2004 (5), 2006 (2), 2009 (1), |
2011 (2) |
2011 (3) |
31 |
2 |
Ruslan Rotan |
2021 (10), 2023 (10) |
2023 (2) |
2023 (5) |
27 |
3 |
Oleksii Mykhailichenko |
2006 (10), 2007 (2), |
2006 (2) |
2006 (5) |
26 |
4 |
Sergiy Kovalets |
2015 (8), 2017 (5) |
2015 (2) |
|
15 |
5 |
Oleksandr Golovko |
2017 (5), 2019 (10) |
|
|
15 |
6 |
Viktor Kolotov |
1996 (7), 2000 (7) |
|
|
14 |
7 |
Volodymyr Onyshchenko |
2000 (1), 2002 (10) |
2002 (2) |
|
13 |
8 |
Alexander Ishchenko |
1998 (8) |
|
|
8 |
9 |
Unai Melgosa |
2025 (6) |
|
|
6 |
10 |
Vladimir Muntyan |
1996 (3) |
|
|
3 |
|
Anatoliy Kroshchenko |
2004 (3) |
|
|
3 |
Notes. Euro cycles are indicated by the years of their completion (number of matches in parentheses).