---
title: "Shakhtar Donetsk will play its Champions League home games at Chelsea"
description: "The Ukrainian club will host four Champions League matches at Stamford Bridge this season, subject to UEFA approval. It has not played in Donetsk since 2014, and since 2022 has borrowed grounds in Poland, Germany and Slovenia. Chelsea's previous owner was sanctioned over Russia's invasion."
category: "Sports"
category_url: https://newsparlor.com/category/sports
author: "Marcus Reed"
published: 2026-08-21T19:39:38.000Z
updated: 2026-08-21T19:39:38.000Z
canonical: https://newsparlor.com/article/shakhtar-donetsk-will-play-its-champions-league-home-games-at-chelsea
tags: ["shakhtar-donetsk", "chelsea", "champions-league", "ukraine", "football"]
---
# Shakhtar Donetsk will play its Champions League home games at Chelsea

The Ukrainian club will host four Champions League matches at Stamford Bridge this season, subject to UEFA approval. It has not played in Donetsk since 2014, and since 2022 has borrowed grounds in Poland, Germany and Slovenia. Chelsea's previous owner was sanctioned over Russia's invasion.

Shakhtar Donetsk will play [four home Champions League games at Stamford Bridge this season, subject to UEFA approval](https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/8/21/ukraines-shakhtar-donetsk-to-play-champions-league-home-games-at-chelsea). It is the latest address in an itinerary that now runs to twelve years.

The club said that [its "true home is Ukraine and we all hope that very soon we will be able to play European football in front of our own fans again. But while the war makes this impossible, Stamford Bridge is an exceptional place for us to call home in Europe"](https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/8/21/ukraines-shakhtar-donetsk-to-play-champions-league-home-games-at-chelsea). Chelsea said it would [work with Shakhtar "to ensure the matches are held safely and comfortably for the team and its supporters"](https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/8/21/ukraines-shakhtar-donetsk-to-play-champions-league-home-games-at-chelsea).

## Twelve years away

Shakhtar left Donetsk in 2014, when fighting in the Donbas made the city untenable for a football club. It left behind the Donbass Arena, a stadium built for Euro 2012 that had been open barely five years.

What followed was a slow migration westward. [From 2014 to 2021 the club played home matches at grounds around Ukraine, and since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 it has hosted them in Poland, Germany and Slovenia](https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/8/21/ukraines-shakhtar-donetsk-to-play-champions-league-home-games-at-chelsea).

A club that cannot play at home cannot do most of the things a club does. Season tickets, matchday income, the local youth pipeline, the ordinary business of being an institution in a place all depend on the place. Shakhtar has kept winning Ukrainian titles and qualifying for Europe throughout, which is a considerable feat of administration as much as of football.

## Why not in Ukraine

Ukrainian clubs continue to play their domestic league inside the country, under air raid protocols that stop matches when sirens sound. UEFA does not permit European competition there, and the reason is not that Kyiv or Lviv are certain to be hit on a given evening. It is that a competition organizer cannot accept the risk profile of a match involving foreign teams, foreign broadcasters and travelling supporters in a country under regular missile attack, where a stoppage cannot be planned around.

The consequence is that Ukraine's clubs are permanent guests in other people's stadiums for as long as the war lasts.

## The ownership footnote

There is an irony in the address, and it is worth stating precisely rather than dressing up.

[Roman Abramovich owned Chelsea for nearly twenty years before being forced to sell after the British government sanctioned him following Russia's invasion](https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/8/21/ukraines-shakhtar-donetsk-to-play-champions-league-home-games-at-chelsea). [The club is now owned by Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali of Clearlake Capital](https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/8/21/ukraines-shakhtar-donetsk-to-play-champions-league-home-games-at-chelsea).

So a Ukrainian club displaced by the Russian invasion will play its home matches in a stadium whose previous owner lost it because of that invasion. The people who arranged this presumably noticed. Neither club made anything of it in its statement, which is probably the right call: the arrangement is a practical favor between clubs, and Shakhtar needs a ground more than it needs a symbol.

Four matches, in London, at home.

## Sources

- [Ukraine's Shakhtar Donetsk to play Champions League home games at Chelsea](https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/8/21/ukraines-shakhtar-donetsk-to-play-champions-league-home-games-at-chelsea)