In the heyday of his favorite Crimea club, Tavriya Simferopol, supporter Gennady Malakhov went all over Ukraine, watched home games at a packed stadium and even saw the team compete in the Champions League in the early 1990s.
However, annexation of the peninsula by Moscow in 2014 has “destroyed, broken and buried our club,” the 42-year-old railroad worker said.
Dressed in a scarf and sweater in the club’s red and green colors, Malakhov was one of just barely 250 attending a game held at Simferopol’s 20,000-seat Lokomotiv Stadium.
“Nobody needs us,” he said, standing on the terraces under overcast skies as a couple dozen other fans waved a flag and chanted in support. “The club have practically ceased to exist.”
Nine months after Crimea’s takeover by Russia in March 2014, UEFA declared the region a “special zone” and banned local clubs from participating in Russia’s national tournaments until further notice.
Tavriya Simferopol was last year re-established by the Football Federation of Ukraine and is playing in the third tier this season.
Meanwhile, Simferopol’s club launched under a new name: TSK-Tavriya.
Two clubs with the same name, Tavriya — one in mainland Ukraine, another in Crimea — embody the problems of soccer in the Russian-occupied peninsula.
The club now plays in a new Crimean Premier League established by the new Russian authorities, which also includes six amateur teams and one other club that previously played in the Ukrainian top flight, Sevastopol.
Although Europe’s soccer authorities gave the green light for a Crimean championship, it distanced itself from its organization and refused to finance it, while corporate sponsors are scared away by Western sanctions imposed on the peninsula following its Moscow annexation.
Crimean clubs are now effectively cut off from the world, with no prospect of playing teams from Russia or mainland Ukraine.
“Many of the top players have to deliver pizzas in the evenings” to make ends meet, Crimean Football Union vice president Aleksandr Krasilnikov told Ukrainian online sports magazine Tribuna. “Professional football in Crimea is on the brink of disappearance.”
The Ukrainian side Tavriya Simferopol, who are based in the small town of Beryslav near Crimea, retained the club’s original name and logo.
“It must have been very painful to the disappearance of the club” that won Ukraine’s first-ever national championship in 1992, Tavriya Simferopol manager Oleksiy Krucher said.
Dozens of fans living in Crimea regularly come to Beryslav to attend the team’s games, he said, adding: “They support the team, but they do not want to be photographed. They risk detention at the Crimean border.”
The two Tavriyas’ reconciliation seems impossible in the foreseeable future. In September last year, Ukraine established its own Crimean Football Federation for Crimea’s exiled clubs, although it is not clear whether it includes any other club besides the Beryslav-based Tavriya.
Russia is resolute in its efforts to procure the international legitimacy for Crimea’s Moscow-controlled soccer federation.
“Everyone will win, including the peninsula’s residents, if the international community as a whole, including the European football community, recognize that Crimea is part of Russia,” TSK-Tavria president Sergey Borodkin said.
The club’s coach, Andrey Dobrianski, said that the future of the team would depend on “how relations with UEFA evolve” and the general political situation around Crimea.
“We are in a rather stressful state of uncertainty,” he said.
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