The compact surroundings of Arena Livyi Bereh in Kyiv’s Osokorky district is not Camp Nou or any of Europe’s other historic arenas, but it didn’t matter to Georgiy Sudakov on Sunday. The 21-year-old playmaker, who more than two years earlier had been forced to take cover from falling Russian bombs in a makeshift bomb shelter with his heavily pregnant wife, was named captain of Shakhtar Donetsk for their second league game of the new campaign.
“2012, this boy dreams of playing for Shakhtar Donetsk …” Sudakov wrote on Instagram after the 1-0 victory against the team they will share their 4,700-capacity stadium with this season. “It’s 2024, this guy is wearing the captain’s armband for Shakhtar Donetsk! Dream, work, believe. After all, dreaming is not harmful. Dreaming is so important. Everything in life is possible!”
It is a measure of Sudakov’s standing at Shakhtar that after a summer of transfer speculation that seemed to be paving the way for his departure, he has been entrusted with the armband by Marino Pusic – the manager who guided the club to their second successive title last season. They rejected a €40m offer from Napoli in January for the player who has racked up more than 100 appearances and scored in last season’s Champions League against Barcelona. They were braced for further bids despite Ukraine’s disappointing group-stage exit from Euro 2024.
While there are understood to have been enquiries from several clubs across the continent – including from the Premier League – Sudakov remains a Shakhtar player for now. But he has been thinking about the day he will have to leave the club he joined from Metalist Kharkiv as a 14-year-old.
“I dream of playing in Europe’s top five leagues,” he says. “But it is difficult to prepare for that – you will only feel everything once you’re there. It’s a different mentality, different culture, different language, but I am ready for this challenge and I am looking forward to it. I am learning English …”
Now with a two-year-old daughter called Milana, who was born a few months after the war against Russia began, he is focused on repeating last season’s league and cup double and making another impression in Europe, where Shakhtar have direct entry to the expanded Champions League. Sudakov has never been to the club’s home ground – the Donbas Arena in Donetsk – after they were forced to play their matches elsewhere because of the Russian occupation of the region in 2014. He was 12 at the time and was also a talented tennis player who had the ability to become a professional had it not been for football.
Having broken into Shakhtar’s first team, making his debut when they beat Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabéu in October 2020, it was not only Sudakov’s career that was in jeopardy a little more than year later. In an emotional post on social media in March 2022, his former coach at Shakhtar, Fernando Valente, revealed that Sudakov and his wife, Yelyzaveta, had been sheltering in a bunker under their parents’ home in Kyiv after Russian attacks intensified on the Ukrainian capital.
“I cry for this couple and for all of the young players and friends I’ve left behind in a Ukraine that gave me happiness for two years,” he wrote. “My heart is broken.”
They took the risky decision to travel to Lviv for Yelyzaveta to give birth to Milana because it was considered safer, although the journey took two days because of the scale of Russia’s bombardment. The Sudakovs have returned to Kyiv, but their thoughts are never far from what is happening on the frontline.
“I have acquaintances and friends who are fighting,” he says. “It is hard to focus on football, but I understand that this is the only chance to glorify our country on the European scale. Sporting achievements, every game for the national team or in the Champions League, is an incredible chance to show the whole world what our country is capable of, how courageous and independent it is. And to remind every time that Russia’s invasion is causing a lot of fear and grief to our people and needs to stop.”
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Ukraine’s early exit from Germany was a bitter pill to swallow for a squad that boasts several emerging talents, including Chelsea’s Mykhailo Mudryk and Artem Dovbyk, the striker who has joined Roma for a reported €38m from Girona.
“We are disappointed with the result, we wanted more,” says Sudakov. “But it was an incredible experience for our team. We do not make excuses. There is no point in talking about youth now, we have a quality team that should have at least got out of the group.”
As for Mudryk, who has endured a testing start to life in the Premier League since leaving Shakhtar in January 2023, Sudakov predicts the best is yet to come. “Mykhailo is an incredible player, he has no upper limit and he can win the Ballon d’Or with his qualities, but everything depends only on him,” he says.
“I believe he will be able to show his best qualities. Ukraine is an incredibly talented country and he is a great example for us to follow.”