The Ukraine National Football Team

Ukraine soccer has gone a long way since their independence due to the split of the USSR. The sport was one of the favorite sports in the country. It was being played as early as 1936 when it was still part of USSR.

The Ukraine National Football Team is the representative of Ukraine as an independent state. The team's first official tournament as an independent state was on April 29, 1992 with Hungary as the opposing team.

Since the national team's independence, the performance of the players has improved a lot and was able to produce good players like Andriy Shevchenko, Anatoliy Tymoschuk and Serhiy Rebrov. Unfortunately, the Ukrainians was not able to qualify to any international tournament. They were unsuccessful in the qualifying rounds to enter with the FIFA World Cup for 1998 till 2002.

But in spite of these failures, the national team did not lose hope that they will soon qualify for the FIFA World Cup. With this in mind, the Ukraine team hired Oleg Blokhin to serve as the official team's head coach. Since then, the Ukraine soccer team was able to reach their first FIFA World Cup on September 3, 2005.

The major success of Ukraine's national team was during the 2006 FIFA World Cup when they were able to beat Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.

In an effort to prosper and support the national team, the Football Federation of Ukraine was established which serves as the governing body for the sport in Ukraine. The federation aims to develop its members to become internationally competitive.