Ukrainian Football Day Date in the current year: April 29, 2024

Football is arguably the most popular sport in Ukraine. It was introduced to the country in the 19th century. English sailors and merchants whose ships were anchored in the Odessa harbor helped popularize football in the portion of Ukraine that was part of the Russian Empire. In 1878, they founded the Odessa British Athletic Club, which cultivated the games of football, tennis, and cricket. The first football team in Odessa consisting exclusively from the locals was organized in 1899.

In Western Ukraine, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time, football was primarily popularized by the Sokol movement, a sports and cultural organization founded in Prague. According to the Ukrainian Association of Football, the first recorded football game in Ukraine took place on July 14, 1894 in Lviv. It was played between two Sokol teams representing Lviv and Krakow.

In 1910, eight football teams from Odessa organized the Odessa Football League, and a year later, Kyiv acquired a football league as well. In 1912, the Odessa football team became the champion of the Russian Empire after defeating the Saint Petersburg team in the final game of the national championship.

After the October Revolution, football mainly developed in large cities, such as Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Kyiv, Odessa, Stalino (now Donetsk), and Kharkiv. Outside Soviet Ukraine, Lviv, Chernivtsi, and Uzhgorod were the key football centers in the portions of Ukraine that were part of Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, respectively.

During the Soviet era, FC Dynamo Kyiv became the first non-Moscow team to win the USSR Football Championship. In 1966-1968, the team tied the record established by FC CSKA Moscow by becoming the national champion three times in a row. Between 1936 and 1991, FC Dynamo Kyiv won the USSR Football Championship 13 times, was the runner-up 11 times, and came in third place three times.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Football Federation of Ukraine (now the Ukrainian Association of Football) was established as the governing body of football in Ukraine. The next year, it became a full member of FIFA and UEFA. The Ukraine national team played its first game against Hungary on April 29, 1992 in Uzhgorod. Its anniversary is now celebrated as Ukrainian Football Day.

Since then, the team’s biggest successes have been reaching the quarter-finals in the 2006 FIFA World Cup and qualifying for UEFA Euro 2012 as the host nation and UEFA Euro 2016 via the play-off route. FC Dynamo Kyiv reached the semi-finals of the EUFA Champions League in 1999, and FC Shakhtar Donetsk became the first club in independent Ukraine to win the UEFA Cup in 2009. Interestingly, the country’s youth teams are quite successful internationally, whereas its senior team fails to deliver at the same level.