Professional Football Club In Ukrainian FC Dynamo Kyiv

 Logo Of FC Dynamo Kyiv

FC Dynamo Kyiv is a professional football club based in the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv. Founded in 1927, the club currently participates in the Ukrainian Premier League and have spent their entire history in the top league of Soviet and later Ukrainian football. Dynamo Kyiv has won twelve league titles, nine Ukrainian Cups, one UEFA Super Cup and two UEFA Cup Winners' Cups. Additionally, they have also won 13 USSR Championships, 9 USSR Cups, and 3 USSR Super Cups, making Dynamo the most successful club in the history of the Soviet Top League.

Dynamo's home is the 16,900 capacity Lobanovsky Dynamo Stadium in Kiev, with a few bigger games played at Olimpiysky National Sports Complex.

The club was founded in 1927 as an amateur team, part of Dinamo, a nation-wide Soviet sport society. This society later became officially funded and patronized by the NKVD (a KGB predecessor), and later by the interior ministry (MVD). In the 1950s–1980s, team players were even officially ranked as police or interior armed forces officers. However, thousands of ordinary Soviet citizens paid symbolic membership fees for the "sport society". The first recorded match Dynamo played on 17 July 1928 against another Dynamo from the Ukrainian port city of Odessa. Soon as the club gained more experience and played on a regular basis, it started to fill the stadium with spectators. The club and football popularity in general in Soviet Ukraine was on the rise.

Stadium Of FC Dynamo Kyiv

The story is often told of how the Dynamo team, playing as "Start, City of Kiev All-Stars", was executed by a firing squad in the summer of 1942 for defeating an All-Star team from the German armed forces by 5 goals to 1. The actual story, as recounted by Y. Kuznetsov, is considerably more complex. This match has subsequently become known as "The Death Match".

After the Nazi occupation of Ukraine began, several members of the Dynamo team found employment in the city's Bakery No. 3, and had continued to play amateur football. During Kiev's invasion, the collective was spotted by Germans and were invited to play against an army team. The collective would play under the name of "Start", composed of eight players from Dynamo (Nikolai Trusevych, Mikhail Svyridovskiy, Nikolai Korotkykh, Oleksiy Klimenko, Fedir Tyutchev, Mikhail Putistin, Ivan Kuzmenko, Makar Honcharenko) and three players from Lokomotiv Kiev (Vladimir Balakin, Vasil Sukharev and Mikhail Melnyk).

In July and August 1942 "Start" played a series of matches against Germans and their allies. On July 12 a German army team was defeated. A stronger army team was selected for the next match on July 17, which "Start" defeated 6–0. On July 19 "Start" defeated the Hungarian team MSG Wal by 5–1. The Hungarians proposed a return match, held on July 26, but were defeated again 3–2.

"Start"'s streak was noticed and a match was announced for August 6 against a "most powerful" "undefeated" German Luftwaffe Flakelf team, but despite the game being talked up by the newspapers, they failed to report the 5–1 result. On August 9 "Start" played a "friendly" against Flakelf and again defeated them. The team defeated Rukh 8–0 on August 16, and afterwards, some of "Start"'s players were arrested by the Gestapo, tortured – Nikolai Korotkykh dying under torture – and sent to the nearby labour camp at Siretz. It is also conjectured that the players were arrested due to the intrigues of Georgy Shvetsov, founder and trainer of the "Rukh" team, as the arrests were made in a couple of days after "Start" defeated "Rukh".

In February 1943, following an attack by anti-German partisans or a conflict of the prisoners and administration, one-third of the prisoners at Siretz were killed in reprisal, including Ivan Kuzmenko, Oleksey Klymenko, and the goalkeeper Nikolai Trusevich. Three of the other players, Makar Honcharenko, Fedir Tyutchev and Mikhail Sviridovskiy, who were in a work squad in the city that day, were arrested a few days later or, according to other sources, escaped and hid in the city until it was liberated.

After the Soviet Union's collapse, the club, now using the Ukrainian name FC Dynamo Kyiv, became a member of the newly-formed Ukrainian Premier League. Dynamo's status as the country's principal club did not change with the break-up as they went on to dominate domestic competitions, winning or being runner-up in every year of the Premier League's existence and becoming a fixture in the UEFA Champions League. Its main rival in Ukraine is Shakhtar Donetsk, a team from the Donbas region, who placed second to Dynamo several times before winning its first Premier League in 2002. The matches between these two sides are called the Ukrainian derby.

In 1996, the club modified their logo to the one that continues to be used today. In 2007, as a part of club's 80 year anniversary two gold stars were added to the top of the crest, representing ten Ukrainian championship titles and ten USSR champion titles. Due to club's poor performance in the UEFA Champions League during the last two seasons, Dynamo's management resolved to a somewhat unexpected decision; for the first time in club's history a foreign manager was invited. Previously in Dynamo, only former players or Dynamo football academy graduates became managers, but in December 2007 Russian coach Yuri Semin was invited to become the new manager of Dynamo Kiev. Semin's first success came shortly after in a friendly competition Channel One Cup organised in Israel over winter-break. It went on to confidently defeat both Dynamo's former top rival Spartak Moscow 3:0, and Dynamo's current top rival Shakhtar Donetsk in the final, winning the competition for the first time in its history. However, the club yielded to Shakhtar in Ukrainian Cup and Ukrainian Premier League in 2008. In 2009. in the club's most successful European campaign since 1999, it reached the semifinals of UEFA Cup (eliminating such teams as Valencia CF and Paris Saint Germain) but was defeated there by Shakhtar Donetsk losing in Donetsk 1:2 after the 1:1 home draw. However, the club celebrated its 13th Ukrainian Premier League title.