The president of Rovno’s “Veres,” Ivan Nadein, shared his vision of the near future of Ukrainian football.
Ivan Nadein“The process of the ‘Balkanization’ of our football is happening; I believe it is definitely occurring. Many of our children are currently playing abroad. Even my son, living in France, has already attended the football school ‘Montpellier’. And hundreds, maybe even thousands of children are already training in foreign clubs’ academies today. There is a young guy at ‘Bayer’ now (Artem Stepanov, — ed. note), many others are in Italy, Germany, and so on.
Look at Croatia. They started to play a leading role in European football just 15-20 years after the war. All these ‘Modric’s’ and ‘Rakitic’s’ that exist today were educated in European football academies as well.
They, first of all, became integrated in terms of language, culture, and mentality. I think that somewhere around the year 2035, Ukraine can also expect at least a World Cup final. But all of this could have never happened, actually. Because both Croatia preserved the championship, and Ukraine managed to do so in 2022. It was April-May, only Kyiv region had been liberated; thinking about football was very, very difficult. Perhaps someone with a business approach and purely formal logic would have said at that time: ‘Let’s take a break for a year.’ That thought was there then too. But that would have been a mistake,” said Nadein on the YouTube channel “Prяма червона”.
