The team have led a nomadic existence since Russia invaded and face a playoff against Sweden in Valencia on Thursday
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round the pitch of the latest stadium Ukraine will call home, a set of banners reels off the venues that have accommodated them in the past four years. The list goes on: Lodz, Prague, Leverkusen, Wroclaw, Warsaw, Krakow, Murcia, Poznan and Trnava, some of those in multiple. If that is an exhausting read then imagine the effect on Serhiy Rebrov’s players, who have been unable to add Kyiv to the roll call since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Now Ukraine will have to navigate a week in Valencia if they are to book a summer at football’s showpiece. They face Sweden at Levante’s neat, modest ground, rather than the fabled Mestalla, and will remain there for next Tuesday’s playoff final if they win. Twenty years have passed since their last appearance at a World Cup, when Rebrov was among the stars of a team that rather slogged its way to the quarter-finals. Now he is the manager and stands on the verge of an achievement that would, given the context, surely surpass those heroics.
“We have to do something for our people,” Rebrov says. “They deserve this. I’m sure our players will fight on the pitch, show character, show everything just to be there. It’s really important to our country just to be represented at the World Cup.”
