Shakhtar CEO: FIFA's decision is not supporting Ukrainian clubs

Shakhtar CEO Sergei Palkin accused FIFA of not supporting the club when they were forcibly moved out of their home city of Donetsk.

"Nobody seemed to pay too much attention to what was going on in 2014," said Palkin to Mirror Football. "That was the same in football as it was with other areas. FIFA's attention to the situation with Shakhtar Donetsk should have started in 2014, not now.

"Their decision is not supporting Ukrainian clubs; indeed it is destroying them – we have a lot of foreigners in the league and FIFA's decision is hurting the club. We lost deals with the amount of up to almost €50million.

"When they are making the decision, they should have been communicating it with all stakeholders including the Ukraine FA and all its member clubs, with the decision made on the information they receive from them.

"But what they did was to issue a decision but not to communicate with any of the clubs, and they ignored a letter that all the clubs signed and a lot of emails that we sent them from our legal department.

"We have sent FIFA a letter to say that if they will not help us in this situation then we will sue them and take them to court. The decision gave agents the opportunity to make themselves much richer, because they can tell other clubs they do not need to pay Shakhtar Donetsk but they can make more commission from that."