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NOW IN UKRAINE,
LVIV HAS POLISH AND
JEWISH INFLUENCES
AND HAS HAD A
CHEQUERED PAST
LVIV FOOTBALL
FEATURE
JUNE-JULY 2012
WIZZ MAGAZINE
89
C
LIMBING THE STEEP PATH THROUGH THE WOODS OF
Lviv’s Snopkiv Park, you will come across the crumbling
Soviet-era football ground that is the Ukraina. Home to
flagship local club Karpaty Lviv, the former Druzhba (‘Friendship’)
Stadium was opened in 1963, when modern soccer was 100 years
old, and the European Nations Cup, or ‘Euro’, but a toddler, three
years of age. Fast-forward nearly 50 years, and on the far southern
outskirts of the city, the newly built Arena Lviv is a sports complex
of the future, with VIP clubs and restaurants, a media centre and
a concert hall. Druzhba was built for a modest club of veterans
from the Lvivsilmash machine plant, and the team wouldn’t even
reach the top flight of Soviet football until the end of the decade.
The Arena Lviv was conceived for the stringent demands of a
modern-day, multipurpose venue, used 365 days a year, with all the
concurrent exigencies of security, transport and logistics.
Yet one is every bit as important as the other. For even if Karpaty
Lviv (as Lvivsilmash became known as) transfer their home matches
to the new arena, the Ukraina still represents football history, as
does this charming, pretty city as a whole.
The choice of Lviv to be one of only four Ukrainian cities to
host football’s Euro 2012 championships this summer may have
surprised many. Odessa or Dnipropetrovsk might have had better
claims to share this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with Kiev,
Donetsk and Kharkiv.
But this historic, culturally rich melting pot is more than just
a geographical stepping stone between the Ukraine and its
“This historic, culturally rich melting pot is
more than a geographical stepping stone
between the Ukraine and co-hosts Poland”
AWL