Nobody in football has a job quite like Serhii Palkin. As chief executive of Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk, Palkin has had to lead the business through a decade of crisis, dislocation and war, while putting out a team that can compete at the game’s highest level.
In early 2014, the club’s home city of Donetsk became the front line as war erupted in the country’s eastern Donbas region. Shakhtar was forced to relocate its entire operation to Kyiv, a city offering swift exit routes if needed for the club’s numerous foreign players.
Due to a shortage of stadiums in the capital, the team’s “home” matches took place across the country, including in Lviv in the west and Kharkiv in the north east. The upheaval was a stark change for a club that had won the Uefa Cup five years earlier, and had marked the opening of a new 52,000-seater stadium with a live performance from Beyoncé. Still, in the following years it was crowned Ukrainian champion four times.