“They are becoming more and more like legionnaires, demanding a transfer or “golden” conditions”, — write: sport.ua
However, the Donetsk club and its first team are not without problems. One of them has already become a kind of trend, and is directly related to the behavior of Ukrainian football players. According to the latest information from blogger Igor Burbas, one of the few players who still directly connects this club with his native Donetsk will soon leave Shakhtar – right defender Yukhym Konoplia, who is a native of this glorious Ukrainian city and a graduate of the Miners’ academy.
On September 30 of next year, Konoply’s contract with Shakhtar expires, and the player, according to Burbas, has made the final decision to refuse his extension. Thus, the “miners” will be forced to look for options for the sale of Konopli already in January next year, if they want to receive at least some monetary compensation from the departure of Juchym to another club. Otherwise, the red-haired fullback will leave his native club absolutely free, signing a contract with a new employer as a free agent.
The current case of Konoply, as already noted above, became a continuation of what can already be considered a peculiar trend – Shakhtar faced a new generation of talented Ukrainian football players who tend to create much more problems for the club than their predecessors.
If earlier the Ukrainian leaders of Shakhtar preferred to stay in the club until they were shown the door, often frankly sitting back and losing the opportunity to try to take a step forward in their career in a stronger European championship, now the situation is radically different – it is not so easy for the “miners” to keep Ukrainians. And even for good money, because, as Ihor Burbas reports, the Donetsk club was ready to pay about 800,000 euros a year to Konopli. And there is every reason to believe that it is about the basic salary indicator, without taking into account bonus, advertising, image and other payments.
In recent years, Shakhtar left several talented and ambitious football players with Ukrainian passports who were leaders in their positions for the Donetsk team. We are talking, first of all, about Mykhailo Mudryk, Anatoly Trubin, Georgy Sudakov, and now about Yukhym Konoplya… Each of them at some stage of their careers achieved the status of a key performer in the first team of Shakhtar, and then… Then, when there was substantive interest in them from Europe, he made it clear to the management that he wanted to leave. Moreover, each of the listed players did it with their own methods, but what united them all was that Shakhtar realized that they would no longer be able to influence the situation.
Getty Images/Global Images Ukraine. Georgy Sudakov Even at the beginning of this century, such a situation (when the club is not able to influence its own Ukrainian football players and the issue of their further career) seemed absolutely incredible for Shakhtar. At that time, the management of “Miners” completely controlled the behavior and career paths of their football players, at least among those who had a national passport. Even against the background of interest from the top European championships, the Ukrainians continued to stay at Shakhtar until the very moment when the club decided that they no longer needed their services. There are enough similar examples. These are Andriy Vorobei, Oleksiy Belik, Oleksandr Kucher, Andriy Pyatov, Oleksandr Gladkyi, Yaroslav Rakitskyi, Serhiy Kryvtsov, Taras Stepanenko, and some others. Each of them at a certain point in their careers had a theoretical chance to move to the top league of Europe, receiving requests from the clubs there, but every time Shakhtar managed to keep their players, which is not surprising, since it was in the interests of the “miners”, before whom the issue of the need to comply with the limit on legionnaires, which continues to exist in the UPL, is always relevant.
Analyzing the previous years, we can single out only one Ukrainian football player who left Shakhtar for the European top league at the peak of his abilities and remained a key figure for the Donetsk team at the time of his departure. We are certainly talking about center back Dmytro Chygrynskyi, who in the summer of 2009, after the victory of the “miners” in the UEFA Cup and a worthy confrontation with “Barcelona” in the match for the UEFA Super Cup, was sold to the same Catalans for 25 million euros. But it was an important deal from an image point of view for Shakhtar, which wanted to demonstrate to everyone that its players are needed and in demand not just by the middle peasants or outsiders of the top championships of the Old Continent, but also by the best clubs in Europe.
Neither before Chygrinsky, nor for many years after him, in fact, none of the Ukrainian Shakhtar players dared to change the situation. In many ways, for this reason, Taras Stepanenko “sat” almost to the last in the Donetsk team, who left only when he simply proved to be unnecessary, and the current captain of the “miners”, 29-year-old Mykola Matvienko, seems to be following the path of his predecessor.
And now a new generation of Ukrainian talents went against the system, it seems, finally breaking it. For example, they would like to keep the same Anatoly Trubin in Shakhtar for many years to come, as the goalkeeper demonstrated miracles of reliability in the frame and looked top-notch not only in the matches of the Ukrainian championship and the Cup, but also quite often in the main grid of the Champions League. However, Trubin, shortly before the end of his contract with Shakhtar, made it clear to the club that he would not extend his employment contract under any conditions. The management of the “orange and black” for some time hoped that the footballer would be able to be convinced, and maybe even “break through”, but… In the summer of 2023, “Shakhtar” had to let Trubin go to “Benfica” for a very modest 10 million euros (even on Transfermarkt, at the time the deal was completed, the nominal estimated value of Anatoly was already 22 million euros) in order not to lose such a skillful player free agent However, the leaders of the Donetsk club still managed to get potentially good conditions for themselves for the future: “Shakhtar” will receive 40% of the profit in case of resale of Trubin by “Benfica” to another club.
The current situation with Yukhim Konoplea generally fits into the cohort of previous departures from the club of Mudryk, Trubin and Sudakov, although it has some peculiarities. We are dealing with a case when Shakhtar encountered a refusal to continue cooperation not from one of the purchased Ukrainians, but directly from a person who went through the club’s academy, and also a native of Donetsk, i.e. “his own”. However, if the same Trubin, who was also born and grew up in Donetsk, made it clear that he wanted to go to Europe without fail, then Konoplia, according to tkami, behaved a little differently in negotiations with Shakhtar management.
Getty Images/Global Images Ukraine. Anatoly Trubin Yukhym, as the media reported, was generally not as categorical about leaving the club as his talented ex-mates from the academy. Rumor has it that Konoplia wanted to get a contract from Shakhtar, which is incredibly luxurious by today’s standards – for 1.5 million euros per year. Thanks to this, Juchym would become one of the highest-paid football players of the team, probably second only to the Burkinabe Lassina Traore and the Brazilian Pedrinho, who were signed even before the start of the full-scale phase of the Russian-Ukrainian war. None of the legionnaires acquired by Shakhtar after February 24, 2022, according to insiders, earns more than the amount that Konoplia demanded from the club as an annual salary.
Apparently, the absence of an obvious ultimatum from Konoply and his willingness to communicate on the subject of a new contract at a certain point convinced Shakhtar’s management that in this case the case of Trubin, or the situation with Mudryk and Sudakov, who demanded that they leave the club, would not be repeated. But all the same, the precedents that happened in the recent past revealed the weakness of the current “Shakhtar”, which was exposed just now. Today, the Donetsk club is no longer able to negotiate with its key Ukrainian football players from a position of strength, as it once was with Vorobei, Belik, Pyatov, Stepanenko and some others. For the current generation of players, “miners” are no longer the limit of dreams, and in terms of wages, they can count on plus/minus similar conditions somewhere in Europe. Plus the factor of war and the desire to leave with families to more peaceful places to live, of course, also added and write it off, unfortunately, it is still impossible to categorically …
However, with some football players with Ukrainian passports, “Shakhtar” still manages to negotiate, so to speak, amicably. For example, the media recently wrote that the “miners” may soon face two more cases when the main players will be on the verge of leaving the club as free agents due to the expiration of their contracts. We are talking about the situations with Valery Bondar and Dmytro Kryskiv, who at first allegedly also resisted and did not want to continue cooperation, but then, if you trust Transfermarkt, they still signed new agreements – until the end of 2027 and 2026, respectively.
But even the extensions of Bondar and Kryskiv were not so simple challenges for Shakhtar. And this means that the situation is really changing, and the Donetsk club needs to look for ways out of it, or somewhat reformat its behavior on the market. After all, it is better to sell your player in time, both the main one and from the immediate rotation, than to lose him for free later, or, even worse, enter into legal disputes with him. After all, as the people say, even charms will not help, as someone is not a match for someone…