Shakhtar Donetsk

The name changed to Shakhtar in 1946, but the trade did not leave it — Miners in English.

The club has not played a competitive home match in Donetsk since 2014. Shakhtar moved west, and since the 2022/23 season its home fixtures have been staged at Arena Lviv, a little over 34 000 seats and some 1 200 kilometres from the stadium it was made to replace.

None of which has cost them the league. Shakhtar have taken 16 Ukrainian titles, the last three in a row through 2025, and the fixture against Dynamo Kyiv remains the one the calendar is read around.

The defining night came on 20 May 2009 in Istanbul, when Shakhtar beat Werder Bremen 2:1 to win the UEFA Cup — the last edition of the competition before it became the Europa League, and the only European trophy the club holds.

The man in the dugout that evening was Mircea Lucescu, who took the job in 2004 and stayed twelve years. He arrived at a club that had won a single championship and left one that had won eight, along with the Istanbul final and a run of Ukrainian Cups. Two of those twelve seasons were played after the move out of Donetsk; he saw the club through the first of them.