Sheriff Tiraspol: There’s A New Sheriff In Town
The UEFA Champions League began on Tuesday, September 14 for most teams, with a couple of exceptions. One of those exceptions was the Tiraspol, Moldova/Transnistria outfit “Sheriff Tiraspol.”
Sheriff started their Champions League run all the way back in July to be in the qualifiers with almost no hope of actually making it. Little did they know that they would end up being the first-ever team from a breakaway province within a country to qualify for the Champions League. Sheriff is also the first Moldovan team to qualify for the Champions League, and the first Transnistrian team to qualify for the Champions League. They were drawn into a group with Real Madrid, Inter Milan, and Shakhtar Donetsk.
Sheriff has a budget of €10,000,000, which without context sounds like a lot, but when you have hundreds of staff members and dozens of players, it is not that much. To compare it to one of their opponents in Real Madrid, the Tiraspol side has 61.68 times fewer Euros overall than even the profits of Real Madrid. If we are comparing budget to budget, they have about one hundred times less than Real Madrid. In the context of Moldovan soccer, it is much more than any other team, but that is why they have not had any success outside of Moldova.
For many leagues outside of the “Top 5”, the German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A, French Ligue 1, English/Welsh Premier League, and the Spanish La Liga, the amount of money teams get for winning the league is quite small, and they have almost no chance of success outside of the domestic competition unless the cards are played perfectly using strong defensive tactics. Sheriff has done both of these things, playing a very old-school and route-one approach to the game, and averaging 32.7% possession in their two-legged tie against Dinamo Zagreb.
This defensive approach often focuses more on the collective team rather than the individuals within it, which means that they can force teams to play down to their level and that in turn helps them tire opponents out. They are a team with a very complex identity, as they play in a separatist region of Moldova called “Transnistria” where Moldova technically has no power over. However, Sheriff also plays in the Moldovan league as Transnistria does not have a national professional league. Sheriff has been stuck in the crossroads of this conflict ever since their founding in 1997 as they are located in Tiraspol, which is the capital of Transnistria.
Due to the fact that they play in such a small country, and even then, a disputed territory within that small country, they have a very small stadium for Champions League standards. The stadium, which is by far the smallest of any team in the tournament, has 14,000 seats and is by far the largest in the country of Moldova. On Tuesday, September 28 at 3 pm EST, they will play against Real Madrid in the Santiago Bernabeu, which will be by far the biggest match in their club’s history.
