Advertisement Supported by European soccer offered support to Ukrainian teams when Russia invaded the country.
Now, as rivals bargain shop in wartime, one top club says the sense of solidarity is gone.
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By Tariq Panja Like his fellow chief executives at soccer clubs across Europe, Sergei Palkin of the Ukrainian team Shakhtar Donetsk spent weeks this summer negotiating player trades.
He and Fulham, a team newly promoted to England’s Premier League, settled on a fee of about million for Manor Solomon, Shakhtar’s Israeli attacker.
Then Palkin agreed to accept a payment around double that amount from Lyon, in France’s Ligue 1, for another of Shakhtar’s foreign-born stars, the 22-year-old Brazilian midfielder Tetê.
The deals were a financial lifeline for Shakhtar: They would deliver a vital cash infusion to club accounts battered by war with Russia in exchange for valuable talents who, in some cases, no longer wanted to play in Ukraine.
But just when the contracts for the deals, and others, were about to be signed, world soccer’s governing body, FIFA, announced that it had extended a regulation allowing foreign players under contract with Ukrainian clubs to temporarily go elsewhere without penalty.
The rule , created in March as an interim measure when Ukraine’s season was suspended , would now remain in place for the entire 2022-23 season, FIFA said.
And with that, both Lyon and Fulham informed Palkin that they were scrapping the multimillion-dollar deals the sides had discussed.
Instead, they would take the players for nothing. “They just talk about the football family,” Palkin said. “But in real life there is no football family.” A Lyon spokesman said the club disputed Palkin’s recounting of events, but declined to provide details.
Fulham declined to comment.
Both teams abided by the rules, but the incidents , and others , have left Palkin frustrated and angry.
In July, Shakhtar announced plans to sue FIFA for million , the value, it says, of deals that vaporized when the rule allowing players to break their Ukrainian contracts was extended.
The situation is a far cry from the widespread messages of solidarity with Ukraine from soccer’s leaders and rival teams in the days and weeks after Russia’s invasion began in February.
Instead, Palkin says he has been left with a distaste for the way some in the soccer community have treated Ukrainian clubs like Shakhtar.
Shows of support and kind words have been replaced by broken promises and the poaching of players and youth prospects , all of it, in his view, driven by the oil that lubricates the industry: money.
Lyon, for example, recently offered to pay Shakhtar 3 million euros, or about