---
title: "Home Is a Hotel in Lviv: Shakhtar's Champions League Road to London"
url: https://sports23.net/home-is-a-hotel-in-lviv-shakhtar-s-champions-league-road-to-london
published: 2026-10-14T08:11:23Z
updated: 2026-10-14T08:15:34Z
summary: "Unable to host in Ukraine, Shakhtar Donetsk play Champions League home games at Stamford Bridge — reached by an 18-hour convoy through Poland under wartime strain."
author: "Sports23 Desk"
categories: ["Features"]
tags: ["Champions League", "Football", "Shakhtar Donetsk", "Ukraine"]
lang: en
---

# Home Is a Hotel in Lviv: Shakhtar's Champions League Road to London

*With European games impossible in Ukraine, Arda Turan's team makes an 18-hour journey to play 'home' matches at Stamford Bridge — and carry a message to the world.*

The morning session at Shakhtar Donetsk's spa hotel base outside Lviv looks almost serene — until you learn that air raid sirens interrupted the dawn. Three hours north-east in Rivne, an alarm the previous day sent players and staff into the stadium shelter and delayed the second half by twenty minutes.

This is the weekly reality of a club that hasn't played a true home European match in years — and this season, for the first time, will host its Champions League games in England, at Chelsea's Stamford Bridge.

## The longest away day

There is no flying in and out. The journey to London begins with a convoy of people carriers winding through western Ukraine to the Krakovets border crossing into Poland — an hour and a quarter of formalities on a good day, eight hours on a bad one — then onward flights from Rzeszow. If the border is unforgiving, the whole trip can run to 18 hours.

Head coach Arda Turan, appointed in May 2025, knows Stamford Bridge well — he scored for Atletico Madrid in a semi-final there in 2014. "It's an iconic stadium but it's not our home," he says. "If you don't have a home stadium at this level it's very difficult, ask any other club. But we have a dream and inside we have great power."

## "It accumulates"

The logistics wear everyone down. Vitaliy Khlivnyuk, Shakhtar's director of sports management, describes his office as a "panic room" — this week's crisis is residency permits for foreign staff, with the application system knocked offline by strikes on Kyiv.

"In the first year playing games away we felt more enthusiastic," Khlivnyuk says. "But with each year it becomes harder. It's like if you didn't sleep for one day, you can recover. You didn't sleep for two, you already feel worse. It accumulates."

The squad's Brazilian contingent — Kaua Elias among the brightest — has built its own rhythm: weekly churrasco cook-ups in Lviv, Fifa sessions on the bus. Elias, who dreamed of playing at Stamford Bridge for Chelsea as a kid, calls Wednesday's match against AEK Athens "a dream in the same way."

The message they carry is simpler. As one club figure puts it: "We're here to show the world that we are alive."