Famous Ukrainian sports journalist Igor Linnik about the starting month of the football season in Ukraine.
"The level of our professional football continues to decline, as evidenced by the results of the best Ukrainian clubs in the qualification of European cups. The Conference League is today’s objective maximum for them.
The owners of our leading clubs continue to reinforce the bearish trend: they are readily selling their best players, which also affects the quality of the game and the competitiveness of the UPL. There are fewer and fewer bright individual talents. Those who haven’t left for a more competitive league in time are stagnating, sliding down to an average level.
Only Shakhtar can afford to buy equally quality players to replace their sold leaders. Only Dynamo is still managing to maintain an alternative course, primarily replenishing with its own trainees.
At the same time, the results of Shakhtar and Dynamo do not differ significantly in the serious football market. Shakhtar earns more and stays slightly above, but correspondingly, it also spends significantly more. As for the margins, it is still unclear who benefits more from them, especially when recalculating for the future distance.
The activity in the transfer market of Polesie is still not showing the highest efficiency: by picking former trainees/reserves of Dynamo and Shakhtar, who are no longer needed by them, it’s hardly worth expecting serious competition with them. But if, as an interim result, Butkevych is satisfied with the prospect of monopolizing the "bronze", this path may seem promising.
Talking about the prospects of the entire UPL until the war is over — you know who with — doesn’t make sense. Thanks for the fact that it even exists! But a number of curious factors still need to be noted.
The times of the football flourishing of agrarians and smugglers, "Inhultsi" and "Minai", seem to be becoming history. And not only for purely economic, political or, shall we say, ethical-aesthetic reasons, considering the football venereal tandem of Pavelko and Kostiuchenko.
Just an agrarian or a smuggler is a special mentality that is very well described in the novellas of O. Henry:
"Tall Bill received all his academic degrees in a cattle ranch camp and on a steppe trail. Luck and frugality, a clear head and a keen eye for the hidden merits helped him rise from a simple cowboy to a herd owner. Then the cattle industry boom began, and Fortune, cautiously maneuvering among the prickly cacti, emptied the horn of plenty at the doorstep of his ranch."
To put it delicately, the aforementioned type of nature is fickle and often completely dependent on external conditions, however, as is the basis of his prosperity — the harvest or the customs chief.
Yes, the crop failures of "Koloso" have changed to the current blessing — but only after all the know-hows, different from the methods of Kostyshyn, were tried in the farm of the younger Zasukha. They brought him back — the lost happiness returned. Now this baton has been taken on by "Alexandria", presumably with the experimental zeal of the youngest in the Kuzmenko family. This is how it works in nature.
So, in the UPL, everyone evolves — as they can. Akhmetov does this, the Surkis brothers do that, Butkevych and his more or less successful colleagues are in creative search, which we are keenly watching.
Yes, there’s something else. The owner of Polesie is the first Ukrainian football club president I remember who openly, through the court, sent a very clear signal to the class of our football dealers: "The way it was before — will not be!”
I will translate his message into American, O. Henry’s language:
"…For any favor received from the hands of philanthropists, one had to pay, if not with money, then with humiliation."
If someone doesn’t understand: the money has decreased, and whoever hasn’t understood this through their head — will understand through...” — wrote Linnik on Facebook.