The Sheriff Tiraspol, a young club that plays in the Divizia Naţională, the highest category of the Moldovan football, was classified for the first time in its history to Champions League this Wednesday, by retaining a three-goal lead against Dinamo Zagreb. The weird thing? The club belongs to a state that is not internationally recognized, so the news of its classification traveled the world as the club of the “country that does not exist”.
Despite its short history (it was founded in 1997), the Sheriff has 19 League titles, 10 Country Cups and 7 Super Cups to his credit, and This Wednesday it became news not only for its football achievement, by getting among the 32 best clubs in Europe, but also for being a club of Tiraspol, an independent region of Moldova and belonging to the State of Transnistria that is not recognized by the international community.
The history of this particular region arose in 1991 when Moldova became independent from the USSR. After that, Transnistria also decided to become independent from the country Eastern Europe, which caused a civil war that ended in 1992 without their political status being resolved. Despite the fact that the Pridnestrovian Moldovan Republic has its own parliament, army, flag and currency, the United Nations considers it part of Moldova and no country in the world recognizes it.
Moldova considers the region on the banks of the Dniester an autonomous territorial unit with a special legal status within its country. An area with Tiráspol as the capital in which a third of Its 500,000 inhabitants are Moldovans and as many Ukrainians and Russians, speaking all three languages.
Currently, the sports entity is under the orders of the Sheriff, a business conglomerate created in 1993 by Viktor Gushan and Ilya Kazmaly, former members of the Soviet secret service.
The giant of firms began as a security company and over the years it added gas station chains, supermarkets, branches in construction, and a presence in communication. Today, it is a commercial giant that “’pulls strings” in Transnistria and that its support helped develop this ambitious sports project that It has a modern stadium with a capacity for 12,000 people, which is surrounded by a large training complex and a five-star hotel.
Another curiosity of the club is that within its squad it has players from more than sixteen countries from different continents. There are three Colombians, three Brazilians and one Peruvian. It is also made up of Russians, Serbs, Greeks, Slovenes and even footballers from Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, Trinidad and Tobago, Malawi, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Luxembourg and Ukraine.
The Sheriff played four times in the group stage of the Europa League (2010, 2011, 2014 and 2018), although the Champions League is his great challenge. This Thursday will be the draw for the crosses and he could face nothing less than Lionel Messi’s PSG.
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