Andriy Yarmolenko

Yarmolenko's own story with Dynamo Kyiv began twice. He first arrived in January 2007, for a fee of €300,000, after a single senior season at Desna Chernihiv, and settled in through the reserve side before his first-team debut on 11 May 2008, when he scored the winning goal against Vorskla Poltava. Over the following years he became the club's all-time leading scorer in the Ukrainian Premier League, with 228 league appearances and 99 goals, and won four league titles, four Ukrainian Cups and three Super Cups along the way. He also collected the Ukrainian Footballer of the Year award four times and finished as the league's top scorer in 2016–17.

That run ended in August 2017 with a €25 million move to Borussia Dortmund, followed a year later by a transfer to West Ham United for a reported fee in the region of €20 million. His time in England was disrupted by injury: a ruptured Achilles tendon against Tottenham Hotspur in October 2018, then an adductor muscle tear in December 2019. He still made 66 league appearances for West Ham, scoring 8 goals, before leaving on a free transfer in 2022 and spending a season at Al Ain in the UAE, where he scored 11 goals in 23 league matches.

He returned to Dynamo Kyiv on a free transfer in June 2023, a deal later extended to run through 2027. For the national team he now captains, Yarmolenko holds the record for the fastest goal in Ukraine's history, scored 14 seconds into a match against Uruguay in 2011, and stands as the country's most-capped player and second-highest scorer behind Andriy Shevchenko.