Thursday, August 2, 2007

Nery to Shakhtar

In case you missed it, Nery Castillo was transferred from Olympiakos to Shakhtar Donetsk for a reported 15 million Euros.

If Olympiakos was obscure to Mexican soccer fans, Shakhtar Donetsk may as well be purgatory. At least you can pronounce Olympiakos in Spanish.

6 comments:

A.C. said...

Shakhtar won't be obscure to most Mexicans for long. They track their new stars with remarkable enthusiasm. Mediotiempo will carry updates, and soon the whole country will be arguing whether Fernandinho is getting Nery the right service or whether Serhiy Tkachenko would do a better job.

Anonymous said...

I'm disappointed he chose Shakhtar. Clearly it was for the money (10 million Euro salary in 4 years? - not bad). I hope this doesn't hinder his continued development/impact as a player. I know it's a decent team and Elano was called up to Brazil duty while playing there but that was because of Dunga knowing him from Santos and not because of the virtues of Shaktar. As it was, Elano was dying to get out of there.

Anyways, I thought Nery had better options. Perhaps he didn't.

jake said...

Maybe the new awesome stadium Shaktar is building lured him in? Check out pics on their website.. both in Ukrainian and English. http://www.shaktar.com/

Anonymous said...

You missed an 'h' there and that link redirects to a sporting goods website.

Try this link to the english side of the club site.

Anonymous said...

Maybe it was the warm sunny beaches and delicious food that made him want to play in the Ukraine

Anonymous said...

Shakhtar isn't that obscure. Even though I grew up a Dynamo Kiev fan, I will grudgingly acknowledge that Shakhtar always had a decent team and still does.

To be fair, the internal league in the Ukraine isn't exceptional beyond the top 4-5 teams, but it's not bad. Plus, Shakhtar has been playing in the Champions League and almost knocked off Sevilla last year in the quaterfinals of the UEFA Cup. The team does have some $$. I think his biggest adjustment will be to the life in the Ukraine.