For the first time in 15 years, Ukrainian Premier League clubs didn’t make it to the spring part of the UEFA competitions. Football experts believe that it’s a manifestation of the crisis in Ukrainian football and the Premier League needs “fresh blood,” and new teams. In the First League, on the contrary, there’s a revival: for example, the revived “Metalist” and “Kryvbas” are playing there. Among the promising ones is Zhytomyr FC Polissia.
FC Polissia summed up the first half of the season. The football club, which plays in Ukraine`s First League, is in ninth place in the standings. Commenting on the team’s results, Hennadii Butkevych, founder of the investment company BGV Group Management, which became the main sponsor of the football club in the summer, noted: “I think luck dances with those who invite it to dance. I think we’ll go through the next stage with much better results. We believe in you.”
Faith in Ukrainian football and the importance of sports for the development of regions and communities is precisely what motivated the business to become a sponsor of a football club. Now BGV Group Management and FC Polissia have a memorandum of cooperation signed, within which the company, the exclusive partner of the club, provides it with partner and sponsorship support.
The players consider the current position of the team in the standings to be unsuccessful, in particular, the team captain Vasyl Hrytsuk, but they are determined to play actively for the second half of the season:
“There were great hopes for our team. But I’ll say to justify our team that a team can’t be built in six months, or in a month. The team needs time to understand each other perfectly, and then there will be a result. Of course, it doesn’t justify us, the current results aren’t so good. But in the future, I think that the management is doing everything possible for us, and the team will be much stronger, we will give all our strength to this, and the result will be better. Our task for the second half of the season is to try to earn as many points as possible and to improve the game. When we fix the game, the results will come too.”
Valerii Platonov, FC Polissia vice-president, told Rubryka that FC was now forming a team, and creating the necessary psychological atmosphere and harmony. The club plans to get into the Premier League and play among the best teams in Ukraine. With the help of the sponsor BGV Group, the team’s home stadium in Zhytomyr is already being renovated so that it meets the necessary criteria:
“We’re creating the very base for the athletes. We need to provide them with all the conditions so that they can train. So we’re renovating the stadium, having hired the best specialists in Ukraine who dealt with stadiums for Euro. We plan to finish by March. We have identified the necessary criteria for the team’s stadium compliance in the Premier League: this includes lighting, dressing rooms; a lot of work still needs to be done, since we must carry out a separate certification for the Major League stadium,” Valerii Platonov comments.
