Like his fellow chief executives at soccer clubs across Europe, Sergei Palkin of the Ukrainian team Shakhtar Donetsk spent weeks this summer negotiating player trades.
He and Fulham, a team newly promoted to England’s Premier League, settled on a fee of about $8 million for Manor Solomon, Shakhtar’s Israeli attacker. Then Palkin agreed to accept a payment around double that amount from Lyon, in France’s Ligue 1, for another of Shakhtar’s foreign-born stars, the 22-year-old Brazilian midfielder Tetê.
The deals were a financial lifeline for Shakhtar: They would deliver a vital cash infusion to club accounts battered by war with Russia in exchange for valuable talents who, in some cases, no longer wanted to play in Ukraine.