The Death Match
FC Start vs Flakelf, 1942
The legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once said “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.”
All football supporters can identify with the quote, they turn out to watch their team season-in season-out and they have all been to watch their team play in “must-win games” where “everything is on the line”. We have all lost count of how many “absolutely pivotal season defining games” we have been to. But what if you actually attended a game that was a matter of life and death for one of its competing teams?
The now legendary ‘Death Match’ took place on the 9th of August 1942 between FC Start and Flakelf at the Zenit Stadium, Kiev in front of a crowd of 2,000 spectators. I could always feel the atmosphere in the town when the Wanderers were at home even several hours before kick off, so imagine the atmosphere in and around the Zenit Stadium on this sunny August day.
The original Zenit Stadium, also known as the FC Start Stadium, as it is today
20 years The Nazi occupation of Kiev in 1941 meant the complete shutdown of sporting clubs with the city’s players and athletes forced to work in the factories and bakeries that serviced the Nazi war effort. At the end of 1941 the Nazi authorities allowed the formation of new sports teams in the city and one of the new teams came from the bakery factory number three. The new manager at the bakery was football fan and before the war he had been a Dynamo Kiev supporter, Iosif Kordik used the bakery as a haven for POWs who had defended Kiev against the German attack on the city and especially surviving footballers from Dynamo and Lokomotiv Kiev. The first to arrive was the Dynamo goalkeeper Georgy Trusevich who had survived the POW camp and headed back to Kiev bedraggled and half-starved.
“FC Start really grabbed the public’s attention when they demolished a Romanian battalion 11-0.”
Trusevich soon tracked down several players in the city and brought them to the bakery and while the factory offered food and shelter it was by no means a safe place as the Nazi purges throughout the city continued relentlessly during 1941 and 1942 where an estimated 100,000 Ukrainian Jews and other ethnic Russians were put to death in the Babi Yar ravine on the outskirts of the city. The Ukrainians who had seen the Germans as liberators from the purges and horrors of the Stalin regime of the 1930s soon realised that there was now a new hell in which they now lived. As it is for many football supporters – going to the game can be an escape from all the problems life throws up – and the Ukrainian football fans during that summer in Kiev were no different.
FC Start began to play games against other teams within the city, first up were Rukh who were seen as a nationalist team, FC Start (FCS) won the game 7-2. At this time they didn’t have a football kit – they wore cut down trousers and work boots, their threadbare shirts in stark contrast with the Rukh team. The next game quickly followed with a team formed from a Hungarian garrison suffering a 6-2 reverse, FCS really grabbed the public’s attention when they demolished a Romanian battalion 11-0. The terrorised people of Kiev finally had something to rally around especially when the local lads were hammering teams made up of the occupying forces. Wins followed against PGS a German military team, another strongly fancied Hungarian outfit MSG Wal were dispatched 5-1. The authorities could not let this continue – the ‘Master Race’ were being humiliated by a team of ‘subhuman Ukrainians’.
FC Start in the dark shirts after their match against PGS
The German command in Kiev sent for their Luftwaffe team Flakelf who had been rumoured to have never lost a game. It was on 6th August that the first game took place between FCS and Flakelf. The locals who turned up for the game had been told by the Germans who attended the game that this was a formality, and that FCS would be put in their place. Flakelf played a very physical game but their tactics failed and FCS ran out 5-1 winners. There was no report of the game in the Kiev press the next day but within 24 hours posters appeared throughout the city advertising the re-match. The ‘Death Match’ would be played on Sunday, 9th August at 5pm at the Zenit Stadium.
The poster for the game and the Flakelf Team
The crowd crammed into the small Zenit Stadium confined to the areas directly next to the pitch while the stands had been reserved for the dignitaries and officers of the occupiers, in the FCS changing room a local SS officer entered and informed them that he would be the referee and that they should not think of winning the game. They were also informed that they would be expected to carry out the Nazi salute before the game. FC Start went on to ignore all the instructions given and by half-time they were leading the German’s elite team by 3-1. Again the stark warning was given during the interval. However the second half found the Flakelf team wilting in the heat of the Kiev summer evening and the teams shared two goals each with FCS running out 5-3 winners. The final whistle blew, and the Ukrainian supporters surged towards the officers and dignitaries in an act of disobedience not seen before in the city during occupation. Maybe they knew the possible ramifications of them winning the game, the players left the field without celebrating their victory.
“Somebody identified Nikolai Korotkykh as an ex-NKVD officer and he was tortured and shot.”
FC Start got to play one more game on 16th August when they dispatched Rukh 8-0. The day after, what would be their final game, the Gestapo turned up at the bakery with a list of names. All the names on the list had played in the ‘Death Match’, they were arrested, tortured and told to confess to being collaborators. None of them did but somebody identified Nikolai Korotkykh as an ex-NKVD officer and he was tortured and shot – he was the first victim of the ‘Death Match’. The other players were sent to labour camps and after a partisan raid on one of the camps the camp commandant in an act of revenge lined up his prisoners and executed every third man, Kuzmenko The FCS forward was the first to be clubbed to the ground and shot, Klimenko who had rounded the goalkeeper and instead of scoring humiliated the German team and kicked the ball back to the centre circle was next to be executed. The third player to die that night was the inspirational goalkeeper Trusevich who had helped put the team together.
“Klimenko who had rounded the goalkeeper and instead of scoring humiliated the German team and kicked the ball back to the centre circle was next to be executed.”
Three other players Goncharenko, Tyutchev and Sviridovsky who had been on a work party in the city heard about the killings and escaped and hid in the city until it was liberated by the Red Army in 1943. The Spartak Kiev players who played for FCS left and disappeared into myth and the chaos of war. The surviving players who had gone to ground were not in the clear when the Red Army marched into Kiev in November 1943, they were interrogated by Stalin’s secret police and sent to work camps to rid them of any possible western bourgeoise influences.
Since the game each of the regimes who have occupied the Ukraine have often used the game as propaganda, for me the story shows the strength of ordinary people plunged into extraordinary circumstances and how their love of football defined them. So maybe Bill Shankly knew about the ‘Death Match’ a game where actually it was “all on the line” when he made his now infamous quote… who knows?
The story of the ‘Death Match’ has resulted in several books and feature films including the 1981 Escape to Victory with a cast that included Bobby Moore, Pele, Mike Summerbee, Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone.
Goncharenko and Sviridovsky at the Memorial for FC Start Team and The Escape to Victory team