Shakhtar Donetsk use Stamford Bridge as their Champions League base this season, playing all four of their league phase fixtures in west London as the war in Ukraine makes hosting European football in their own country impossible.
Wednesday night brings AEK Athens to Stamford Bridge for the first of those fixtures, with Sporting CP, Fenerbahce and Real Madrid to follow. The arrangement grew from a relationship between the two clubs that began with the sale of Mykhailo Mudryk to Chelsea in 2023, and Chelsea announced the agreement in August, pledging to work closely with Shakhtar to ensure matchdays ran safely for players and supporters alike.
Chief executive Sergei Palkin explained that he had approached Chelsea co-owner Behdad Eghbali directly with the idea, and that the reaction had been positive. He chose London because of the size of the Ukrainian community already living there, and said that a legendary stadium such as Stamford Bridge could provide extra motivation for the club's younger players.
The journey to reach it is anything but straightforward. Following Friday's 3-0 victory at Veres Rivne, the squad embarked on a trek lasting more than 20 hours to London, travelling by coach, train and a flight from Warsaw. AEK flew direct from Athens. The Krakovets border crossing alone takes just under two hours to reach, and on previous trips the club has been held there for as long as eight hours. Bus driver Oleksandr recalled covering 930 miles to reach Slovenia for a Conference League fixture last season.
The hardship reaches well beyond travel. More than half the squad sleep in underground bunkers. Domestic matches are regularly interrupted by missile and drone attacks — the second half of the Veres Rivne game was delayed by 20 minutes after an air raid alarm sent players and staff to the stadium shelter. The system used to process residency permits for foreign players has been knocked offline by Russian bombing in Kyiv.
Head coach Arda Turan, appointed in May 2025, led Shakhtar to the Ukrainian Premier League title in his first season, having taken over after the club finished second to Dynamo Kyiv the previous campaign. The 39-year-old appeared emotional when asked about the conflict. "We are not trying to make a drama, but we will underline this," said Turan. "We are living at war and children are dying in Ukraine. We are living with this, but we don't accept it. We are looking on the positive side of being (in London) but we are dreaming of the day that we can play in Ukraine again."
Sporting director Darijo Srna, who has spent more than two decades in Ukraine, traced the club's displacement back to well before 2022. He said the club lost everything in 2014 and that was when, for Shakhtar, the war truly started. He was equally pointed about the consequences of Fifa's ruling that foreign players could declare their contracts suspended following the Russian offensive: "Fifa destroyed us. We lost a lot of money, a lot of players," Srna told The Sun.
Shakhtar's Donbas Arena hosted matches at Euro 2012 but has not staged football since 2014. Photos shared on Telegram show panels missing from its exterior, with the surrounding area deserted and heavily overgrown. The club opened the league phase with a 1-1 draw away to PSV Eindhoven and wear an 'Invest in Ukraine' slogan on their shirts throughout the campaign. Funding from Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine's richest man, whose SCM holdings company operates across 30 countries, underpins the entire operation.
Reporting: Mirror, The Sun, Football.London, Evening Standard, Guardian, Daily Mail, BBC, The Guardian.