The calls to relocate the World Cup are multiplying. The latest comes from OL coach Paulo Fonseca, who spoke in an interview on Monday, February 23, marking 4 years since the start of the war in Ukraine, which he experienced there with his wife and son. He recounts his time in a bunker and his extraction, lending credibility to his opposition to President Trump.
On Monday, February 23, Paulo Fonseca, coach of Olympique Lyonnais since January 2025, agreed to discuss his departure from Ukraine, where he was when the war started four years ago. The former coach of Shakhtar Donetsk (a club from a city now occupied by Russian forces) between 2016 and 2019, had come on “vacation” with his 3-year-old son and wife to repatriate her family to Portugal in case a conflict broke out, which everyone had long feared.
“With my wife, that night, we talked a lot, she cried: ‘I think the war is going to start and we will have to go into exile again’. I replied: ‘No, nothing will happen’. In fact, at 5 in the morning, we were woken up by the sound of bombs. The war had already started,” recalls the coach who was suspended for physically confronting a Ligue 1 referee.
The story of a wild extradition
“Everyone was fleeing. At that moment, there was panic. We took our suitcases and got into a minibus with the whole family,” he recalls. He explains being taken to a “bunker” under a hotel owned by the president of Shakhtar. “We spent a night there with Roberto De Zerbi, who was the club’s coach at the time. We were probably 60, scared, watching on TV the Russian soldiers trying to enter Kiev,” Fonseca recounts.
He was then provided a van by the Portuguese embassy to reach “Moldova”, which he did in about thirty hours. Upon arrival, he details his “relief”. “I have never been more afraid for our lives, for the life of my son and my wife. I don’t think about it every day, but it’s always present in me,” swears the Portuguese coach. It is partly for this reason that he takes a stand against Donald Trump’s policies in this interview.
He begins by expressing the “shame” he felt when the American president was awarded a peace prize by FIFA. “We would like the World Cup to be held elsewhere, and not in the United States, not at this time. The position of the American president has been to forget, to ignore the most disadvantaged, the weakest, and to be on the side of his economic interests,” he positions, annoyed by the reduction of American aid to Ukraine since the extreme right president’s return to the White House.
