Mudryk, the Chelsea man who “reinforced” the Ukrainian armed forces

Chelsea’s signing of Ukrainian winger Mykhailo Mudryk – at a cost of €100 million – is extraordinary. But not so much because of the amount, in itself striking but no longer unusual in the European market, and not even because the transfer was a sudden action that annulled the offer from Arsenal, a club that had been negotiating with Shakhtar Donetsk for several months. , but for the reason that led the young star to choose one shirt over another: Chelsea included 25 million euros in their offer, which was later donated to the Ukrainian armed forces by the owner of Shakthar, Rinat Akhmetov .

Soccer and war are two old acquaintances that are normally avoided, since the former does not occur when the latter arises, so the moments in which both phenomena are intertwined are not common. However, there are historical episodes that come to mind regarding the gesture of Mudryk and Akhmetov, such as the Christmas meeting between the British and Germans in World War I, or the conflict between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969. None of them is so memorable, however, as “The Game of Death” played by Ukrainian footballers Dynamo and Lokomotiv kyiv in 1942.

The story is moving. Clubs dissolved by the Nazi occupation, some footballers got work as bakers to ensure a daily livelihood. There they were minimally organized and, under the name of Start FC, they held matches against Hungarian, Romanian and German teams. They all won. The penultimate one of them was against a Luftwaffe team, Flakelf, whom they beat 5-1 and who demands revenge. This becomes a propaganda point: football successes threaten to stir up a fire of national resistance; a Reich victory, on the other hand, would feed the narrative of the new order. The final match, refereed by a member of the SS, closed with a 5-3 victory for the Ukrainians. Several of them die days later, assassinated, tortured or in concentration camps.

The game has been romanticized in ‘Escape to Victory’, a feature film also famous for having Pelé in its cast. But what in Huston’s film is a multicultural allegation against Nazi racism, and a denunciation against the horrors of totalitarian dictatorships, in reality it was a confused episode where Nazi and Soviet propaganda fought to seize the symbolic power of a sports meeting.

Today, as historians try to separate myth from fact, Mudryk’s signing also serves as a reminder of how in Ukraine the stories of death and football seem more intertwined than anywhere else. In Akhmetov’s words: “We can only talk about Ukrainian football thanks to the Ukrainian Army, the Ukrainian people and the enormous support we have had during this incredibly hard period. And the only way we can defeat the evil that has come into our homes is by working together.”

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