I hate our home kit BTW, the away is nice and clean and the third looks like it’s been designed by Ronald McDonald. There are some interesting strips this year!
Good to see Barca continue to be Bayern’s ■■■■■■■.
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How’d you guys go with Stan sports? I didn’t watch live but the replays seemed good quality and was easy to navigate
As noted above it’s a joke they can’t have all football on the one platform. I personally have Optus sport and Kayo, with many live streams available I don’t see the purpose in forking out for another streaming service.
It’s frustrating that’s for sure, especially when you’re a sports lover.
No way I’m paying $20 a month for UCL and rugby. They’ll need to get a fair bit more content before that becomes value.
Inter all over Real Madrid. We could easily be 2 goals down. 0-0 at the half.
Liverpool could be 6 up here, have absolutely battered Milan.
City 6-3 up over Leipzig
3-2 another euro classic at Anfield.
Hendo’s goal. What a hit
And Real dicked an 89th min winner
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Thank you, Courtois!
Internet seemed to crap itself last night so can’t even watch the highlights this morning! Caught the start of Pool v Milan and it looked like it was gonna be 6 - 0 at halftime
Stan not doing any halftime/full time shows?
Still don’t have my Stan Sports account sorted yet, so only followed the game on Twitter. Some goal by Hendo to win it!
Heads up that although Stan will work on your TV, Stan sport isn’t available on all TV models, if you’ve got a chromecast/fire stick just run it through there
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This story is BONKERS!
FC Sheriff: the Moldova minnows preparing to face Real Madrid and Inter
“You seem like a nice guy. But if you ask the wrong questions over there, anything that criticises Russia or Putin, they will kill you.”
Welcome to Transnistria, home of the Champions League’s newest participants, FC Sheriff Tiraspol.
As it turns out, this warning, issued to author and journalist Robert O’Connor as he was researching his book Blood And Circuses: A Football Journey Through Europe’s Rebel Republics, was a little sensationalist. He went there, he was not killed. But it does indicate just how outsiders view the strange state in which FC Sheriff exist.
They are billed as the first Moldovan football club to qualify for the Champions League’s group phase, which is sort of true and sort of isn’t. It’s true inasmuch as they play domestically in the Moldovan Divizia Nationala, but woe betide anyone who describes them as a Moldovan club from a Moldovan city.
That’s because Tiraspol is in Transnistria. Which sounds like a made-up former Soviet state, because that’s sort of what it is.
Transnistria is a relatively narrow strip of land in the west of Moldova, roughly the size of Somerset. It declared independence from the rest of the country — which sits between Romania and Ukraine — in 1991, following the break-up of the Soviet Union. There was a short military conflict the following year but following a ceasefire in the July, the two states have coexisted ever since.
It has its own flag and currency (which you can only get inside Transnistria and is illegal to take over the border), Russian is spoken instead of Moldovan, and the loyalty to Russia/the Soviet era can be seen from the hammer and sickle on that flag and in most other places you care to look in Tiraspol, its capital. Those that have been there describe it as basically what they picture the bleakest parts of the old Soviet Union as looking like. Poverty is rife (one visitor tells of leaving a little leftover local currency with a hotel receptionist, who promptly burst into tears), roads are hazardous, outsiders are treated with suspicion.
But officially, according to the rest of the world, Transnistria doesn’t exist.
No countries in the United Nations recognise it as a state. The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office travel advice doesn’t quite tell you not to visit, but it does say that the British consulate in the Moldovan capital Chisinau has no reach in Transnistria. Basically: Go if you like, pal. But if you get into trouble, you’re on your own.
An unlikely place for a Champions League club to exist, then.
Sheriff reached the group stage for the first time by getting through four rounds of pre-qualifiers, capped by beating Dinamo Zagreb — who knocked Tottenhamout of last season’s Europa League on their way to the last eight — 3-0 on aggregate last month, and were then given a bumper draw with Real Madrid, Inter Milan and Shakhtar Donetsk in Group D.
By any standard, for a tiny side from an obscure corner of Europe that officially doesn’t exist to be on a level with such giants of the game, is an extraordinary story.
But even though they are the first club from the Moldovan league to reach this stage, it isn’t exactly the feelgood tale of a plucky club done good.
For a start, they are dominant in Moldova to the point of parody. They have won 19 of the last 21 domestic titles, and won 32 of their 36 league games last season, recording six 6-0 victories, two 7-0s and a 10-0. The club on the receiving end of that last one, Speranta Nisporeni, kept the score down in their final two games by simply not turning up, unable to fulfil their fixtures for a variety of reasons. And they weren’t even the worst team in the division last season.
FC Sheriff celebrate with their fans in the Champions League qualifier against Dinamo Zagreb (Photo: Goran Stanzl/Pixsell/MB Media/Getty Images)
The reason for Sheriff’s dominance is pretty simple and predictable: they have money, and nobody else in Moldova does.
For example, Sheriff have a modern stadium on the edge of town surrounded by 18 training pitches, a complex that reportedly cost $200 million to build. “We don’t train outside in the wintertime,” their left-back Keston Julien tells The Athletic . “We have an indoor pitch. We have two club hotels, two swimming pools.”
No other club in Moldova even owns their stadium let alone have one with such state-of-the-art facilities, instead having to rent municipal facilities to train.
O’Connor tells a story about a match he attended where he saw the bus of another local top-flight team pulling up behind the stand. When he asked why, he was told that the vehicle was the only thing the club in question owned and they didn’t have anywhere else to park it.
If the Divizia Nationala was a race, Sheriff would be the thoroughbred racehorse, whereas the rest are asthmatic pigs.
The issue of where that money comes from is another… interesting element to the story.
Sheriff are a relatively young team, “founded” in 1996 when FC Tiras Tiraspol were plucked from the second tier and renamed after the big local corporation. Actually, “big” doesn’t really do Sheriff, the company, justice: to all intents and purposes they own Tiraspol, the city, with “close links” to the local ruling political party, and while you’re most likely to see their presence represented by the ubiquitous star logo of their supermarkets and petrol stations, in truth their collective finger is in just about every pie in town.
Historically at least, some of those pies have been, shall we say, “unofficial”.
In the early days after the fall of the USSR, former Soviet states were basically the wild west, with border checks minimal and the possibility of earning a tidy fortune by smuggling all manner of things over those borders one that many couldn’t resist. One man who took full advantage of those possibilities was Viktor Gushan, a former policeman who set up Sheriff in 1993 with a colleague, Ilya Kazmaly. Appropriately enough for a company set up in a semi-lawless state, the name “Sheriff” was chosen because Gushan loves old Western films. He is still the top dog at both the company and the football club, whereas Kazmaly stepped down a few years ago.
Gushan is, to say the least, not a man prone to lengthy public proclamations. In fact, as far as anyone can work out he’s only ever been interviewed once to any great extent, for Vanity Fair magazine in 2005. “Bring any businessman from France or the United States here and he’ll hang himself in six months,” Gushan said then. “The Transniester stamp is not recognized internationally. Nothing is allowed. We have had to operate” — he paused to get the right wording— “between things.”
This is the money on which Sheriff’s success, and thus their presence in this season’s Champions League, is based.
One local The Athletic spoke to about Sheriff, Tiraspol and Transnistria in general asked not to be named in connection with anything negative we might write about Gushan.
He was keen to point out that Gushan pays well, and pays on time, though. It’s fair to say that his influence remains strong and extensive.
Sheriff’s qualification for the group phase is unlikely for a couple of reasons. Most obvious is the fact they’ve done it from the Moldovan league, but the other is that they’ve done it after a few years where it looked like their project had failed, and their chance of making the big time had gone.
They reached the Europa League group stage four times between 2009 and 2017 (playing Tottenham in 2013-14, losing 2-0 and 2-1), but in the last couple of years their star seemed to have faded.
In 2018, they were beaten by KF Shkendija from Macedonia in the Champions League qualifiers, then lost to Valur of Iceland in the Europa League play-offs. A year on, they were eliminated at those same points by Georgian outfit Saburtalo Tbilisi and AIK Stockholm from Sweden. Last season, it was defeat to Qarabag of Azerbaijan in the Champions League, then the Republic of Ireland’s Dundalk knocked them out on penalties short of the group stage of the Europa League and went on to meet Arsenal.
Not exactly what you’d call unstoppable momentum.
So, why did they make it this time? Partly it could just be the natural variation of the Champions League qualifiers, which they have participated in many times and often only narrowly missed out in. But it also has something to do with a rule change in Moldovan football that came in towards the end of 2019.
Before that, each club in the Divizia Nationala had to field at least four Moldovan players in their XIs, but now it’s a free-for-all. Sheriff now have only five Moldovans in their Champions League squad, two of whom are back-up goalkeepers, and 15 nationalities are represented.
The result has been a heavy squad turnover. Brazilian full-back Cristiano, who joined in 2018, is their longest-serving player, and nine of their starting XI in that clinching qualifier against Dinamo Zagreb were signed in 2021. One of those, Brazilian forward Luvannor, joined in July and got a solid nine appearances under his belt before leaving for Al-Taawoun in Saudi Arabia at the end of August.
The rough plan was — and, to a point, still is — to ape the Shakhtar Donetsk model in neighbouring Ukraine, by finding players from South America or other uncut gems from obscure corners of the footballing globe and giving them a platform to perform, at which point someone wealthy in one of the big European leagues would buy them.
They’ve done this on a relatively small scale — winger Cyrille Bayala and forward Vitalie Damascan went to Lens in France and Italy’s Torino respectively a couple of summers ago, and in the late 2000s there appeared to be a fairly regular trickle of players to the Moscow clubs — but it’s fair to say they’re still waiting on their Willian/Fernandinho/Fred moment.
Sheriff players celebrate reaching the Champions League group stage (Photo: Jurica Galoic/Pixsell/MB Media/Getty Images)
Perhaps the likes of winger Adama Traore (not that one), forward and club captain Frank Castaneda and Peruvian defender Gustavo Dulanto will be ones to catch the eye on this bigger stage and earn themselves and Sheriff a handy payday.
One of the players who has arrived in Transnistria with an eye on something brighter is Julien.
A left-back from Trinidad & Tobago who models his game on Marcelo, he was spotted by his agents playing for a few local teams back home and moved to Slovakian side AS Trencin in 2017, before Sheriff signed him in 2020.
“Now I can showcase my talent,” he tells The Athletic . “In Trinidad, we have a lot of players of my talent, but they just don’t get the opportunity to come to Europe. Now I can showcase myself against teams like Real Madrid, Inter Milan, and if I play good in these games, who knows what can happen in the future? I can make a bigger step in my career.
“Our fans know that players come here to develop and make a bigger step in their career. That’s my goal this year — to play as many games as I can and to make a bigger step.”
And here is the good news story, if you’re looking for one.
Julien came to Europe from Trinidad aged 19, made his bones at a mid-level Slovakian club and over the next couple of months, if fit, he’ll be playing in the Bernabeu and San Siro. “It’s not just about playing in these great stadiums, but having a good game too,” he says. The story of FC Sheriff is a murky one, but there are some bright spots in the dark.
It should probably go without saying that they get through managers at a fairly healthy clip. Ukrainian Yuriy Vernydub, who made his name coaching Zorya Luhansk in his homeland, is the current man in charge, but there have been 11 permanent bosses over the last decade. The longest-serving was Roberto Bordin, an Italian who lasted about 18 months between 2016 and 2018.
So how will they do? Will they cause Madrid and Inter and Shakhtar any problems? Almost certainly not. It would be a surprise if they didn’t lose all six of their group games.
But stranger things have happened.
Like, for example, a team from a place that doesn’t exist playing in the Champions League.
(Top photo: Goran Stanzl/Pixsell/MB Media/Getty Images)
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COYI
Wow. Sheriff beats my Real at the Bernabeu 
2 shots, 2 goals Can’t ask for more.
And, this thread is epic!
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So that’s probably one of the biggest upsets in football if not sporting history
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Absolutely amazing. I imagine Mr Gushan has made some very handsome money with the back to back Champions League win.
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