Three years ago the Ukrainian club were inspiring youngsters in the Europa League – now their existence is in real peril after a Russian siege put them through hell
Words Andrew Todos
In the early hours of February 24, the players of FC Mariupol made their way to the airport. A difficult first half of the season had rooted them to the foot of the Ukrainian Premier League table – 14 of 18 matches had ended in defeat. After heading to a mid-season training camp in Turkey to regroup, they were ready to return home. In three days’ time, they were due to resume their league campaign with an away match at Chornomorets Odesa. However, when they arrived at Antalya airport, they received the devastating news. Their plane would not be taking off. Ukraine had been invaded.
In the six months since then, the city of Mariupol has become known the world over, for reasons synonymous with suffering and destruction. Before the war, around 430,000 people called it home. Situated on the shores of the Sea of Azov, just above the Black Sea, Mariupol was a rapidly improving industrial setting, renowned for its colossal steel plants and thriving port.
Since gaining promotion back to the top flight in 2017, FC Mariupol had been stable competitors in the Ukrainian Premier League. They began their existence back in 1960 as Azovstal Zhdanov, named after the local steelworks. Until 1989, shortly before the collapse of the USSR, the city of Mariupol had been called Zhdanov, after Soviet politician Andrei Zhdanov.
In 2002, they became Illichivets Mariupol after another of the local steelworks, named in honour of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. By 2017, links to the Soviet era were far less welcome and they were retitled FC Mariupol under owner Tariq Mahmood Chaudhry, a Pakistan-born businessman and British citizen whose interests were partially connected to the import and export of metals from Mariupol’s plants and port.
Despite Mariupol being situated just 20km from the front line of Ukraine’s combat with Russia’s proxy forces in the Donbas, the past five years had been the most successful in the club’s history. The conflict had forced fellow top-flight outfits Shakhtar Donetsk and Zorya Luhansk into indefinite exile from their own regions, and FC Mariupol had been briefly pushed out as well: the city was under a short-lived Russian occupation in 2014, until a rapid liberation by Ukrainian forces. After a short spell playing in Dnipropetrovsk, the team returned home in 2015.
Arriving in 2017, vice president Andriy Sanin set about catalysing a major redevelopment of FC Mariupol’s infrastru
