Mourinho, Shcherbakov, and Ronaldo (Photo: Shcherbakov's personal archive)

Shakhtar Donetsk will play Sporting in the fourth round of the Champions League on Nov. 3.

Before the match, the Portuguese club fired head coach Rui Borges. According to A Bola, the team will be led by Paulo Fonseca, a former coach of the Miners.

Notably, the clubs are also linked by Serhii Shcherbakov, a product of Shakhtar's youth system who later moved to Sporting, where his career came to a tragic end.

Serhii was born Aug. 15, 1971, in Bryansk, Russia, into a family of athletes, but grew up in Donetsk. His father was a footballer, and his mother was a gymnast. The boy began playing football at Shakhtar's youth sports school, going through all of the youth age groups. At 17, Shcherbakov made his Shakhtar debut in a Federation Cup match against Kairat in Almaty (a 3-1 loss). The Miners rated the player's potential highly and gave him an apartment in Donetsk and a VAZ-2107 car.

Serhii Shcherbakov with the award for top scorer of the World Youth Championship / Photo: Shcherbakov's personal archive

In all, Shcherbakov played 70 matches for Shakhtar and scored 16 goals. He also became a 1990 European champion among juniors (under 18) with the Soviet national team, and the next year scored five goals at the youth World Cup, where the Soviet team won bronze. This drew the attention of European clubs. The midfielder himself wanted to play abroad:

"With the USSR youth team, I traveled around Europe. I saw how people live there. I wanted to play for a European club and earn money. That is why I turned down two offers, from Kyiv's Dynamo and Moscow's Spartak."

In April 1992, Shcherbakov played in Ukraine's national team's first-ever match, against Hungary (a 3-1 loss), starting in the lineup. That summer he went with Ukraine's senior team on a tour of the United States, where he played against the local national team (a 0-0 draw). In the end, the player decided to play for Russia, but he never played for Russia's national team.

The midfielder was called up to the youth and Olympic teams, for which Shcherbakov played nine matches and scored seven goals. By his account, he was supposed to play for Russia at the 1994 World Cup: "In 1993, I played for the youth team and scored two goals against Greece in Athens. Coaches Boris Petrovich Ignatyev and Yuri Pavlovich Semin were bringing me up to the first national team for the 1994 World Cup. I was so proud when my father found out I was on the first team's list!"

Notably, at that time Ukrainian players were offered large sums of money and apartments in Moscow to play for Russia.

In July 1992, Shcherbakov signed a contract with Sporting Lisbon. Head coach Bobby Robson was personally interested in his transfer. Serhii played alongside stars Luís Figo, Krasimir Balakov, and Ivaylo Yordanov, and had the lowest salary among the club's foreign players.

"I got $7,000 at Sporting. As I found out later, it was the lowest salary of all the foreigners at the club. But after 600 rubles back home, that money seemed enormous to me," Shcherbakov said.

Notably, the club helped the player arrange a sham marriage to obtain a Portuguese passport so that he would not count as a foreign player.

For the Lisbon team, the forward played 25 league matches and scored five goals, and his further career was ruined by a crash.

Mourinho, Shcherbakov, and Ronaldo / Photo: Shcherbakov's personal archive

After Robson was fired as coach in December 1993, the players held a farewell party for him. Shcherbakov drank there and then got behind the wheel. Serhii disregarded traffic rules: he ran several red lights and crashed into an oncoming car. The car had to be cut open to extract the player. In the crash, 22-year-old Shcherbakov broke his spine and suffered lower-body paralysis. Since then, the midfielder has been confined to a wheelchair.

"There was a feast to see Bobby Robson off. We had a few drinks. I should have taken a taxi instead of getting behind the wheel," Shcherbakov said.

“Three months after the accident, it became clear I would never be able to play football again. I was afraid of the people around me, that I was getting in their way of living. I tried not to go out among people. That was all. I never had thoughts of suicide.”

Shcherbakov's car after the accident / Photo: cnopm.ru

After rehabilitation, the former player settled in Moscow and worked with Moscow's Lokomotiv. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Shcherbakov has not made a single public statement about events in his homeland.

Shcherbakov after the accident / Photo: Shcherbakov's personal archive