Thread by @SlavaMalamud

So let me put this into perspective a little bit. I don't think a lot of folks truly understand what it means that a team from Moldova has made it to the Champions' League.
I grew up a 15-minute drive from Tiraspol and I can give you a tiny bit of an idea...

https://twitter.com/btsportfootball/status/1430635915907674122

Moldova's football, even in the Soviet times, was always comically bad. Back in 1983, when Nistru Kishinev made it to the Soviet top league, it went 3 wins, 4 draws, 27 losses..
I remember watching Nistru-Spartak Moscow and going outside to play at halftime, with the score 1-1...

It ended 6-1 for Spartak, and it was one of the more watchable games.
As for Tirsapol, it was a Division 3 dweller, playing in front of 500 fans in a dilapidated relic. In 1989, my hometown team, Tighina Bender, was promoted to Soviet Division 3, so we played them a lot...

Well, first they stole like 5 of our top players. They came to our stadium, which was next to railroad tracks, and a train would occasionally go rumbling behind the Eastern Stand, shaking the entire contraption. The scoreboard was human-operated (I was often one of the humans)

There was an old watchman living on the grounds. He'd sometimes come out during the matches to dump the trash behind the Eastern Stand. Sometimes, he'd dog come out too, to dig through it. Tighina was one of the top 4 Moldovan teams at the time.

And, let me tell you, Tighina's fortunes have only gotten worse since. The stadium is the same, except now the Eastern Stand is collapsed. It's pretty much the same story everywhere else - except in Tiraspol.
What's happened in Tiraspol is a criminal and hilarious anomaly...

Tiraspol, of course, is the "capital" of "Transnistira", a breakaway "state" created by Moldova's Russian speakers because they did not want to learn Romanian. Transnistria considers itself the last functioning outpost of the Soviet Union. Like, for real. Here is the flag:

The green band represents their not giving a fuck about history. Like, remember those Japanese soldiers on isolated islands who kept fighting until the 70s because they didn't believe the war was over? That's Transnistria. An entire country living in 1991, as if nothing happened.

The "country" was created as a project by the KGB to keep Moldova from slipping out of Russia's sphere of influence. It's first "president" was some dude from Siberia with an extremely murky past whose full biography is not known to anyone. The country's second "president"...

... basically assembled a cabinet of "ministers" most of whom were very pleasant-looking single women in their 30s, then chose himself a wife from among them (the Minister of Internal Affairs) and retired happily.
How does a country like this survive? Russian assistance and...

... drug and gun trafficking. The entire business is owned by a couple of very powerful families who run the "country" as one big mafia organization. One of the companies they own is Sheriff, Transnistria's only supermarket chain, and also a convenient front for trafficking...

This is were Sheriff Tiraspol comes from. The team was founded by the owners of the company (both former KGB agents, of course) who have bankrolled it as a giant money-laundering operation. They've built a huge football complex in the middle of a quiet Moldovan cow pasture...

It's literally the only modern building in the entire country. The only building of any size without Soviet mold growing on it. And it's goddamn fancy as hell. This is the building where Sheriff play opponents from Hincesti, Otaci and Orhei, whose home grounds are actual pastures

In fact, this is the only stadium in the entire nation of Moldova that can be described as such. Everything else in the country is literal pastures. Or ruins, like the stadium in Bender. Or dumps. In some towns, there are piles of construction junk just beyond the touchlines...

Absurdly, the Sheriff Stadium is now the primary ground for Moldova's national team, even though "Transnistria" vehemently denies being a part of Moldova and there are customs checkpoints and everything. But since nobody anywhere recognizes "Transnistria", they have no choice...

Anyway, the mafiosi who own Sheriff have built this European-quality stadium and assembled a team of foreigners (lots of second-rate Brazilians and some decent Africans) that uses the Moldovan league for a punching bag. Money's gotta get laundered somehow, right?

All of this is being done to the proud bafflement of the locals, who have never seen any kind of football beyond factory-level Soviet kickarounds prior to Sheriff's creation. I mean, the average attendance at matches in Moldova is in the dozens, unless Sheriff is involved...

There literally can't be a bigger disconnect in football than between Transnistria's population and the Champions' League. The stadium is in the village of Ternovca, which, like I said, is a cow pasture. To the east is Tiraspol's 1970s Soviet suicidescape. To the west...

... the village of Parcani, populated entirely by ethnic Bulgarians who produce mostly salty cheese and very exotic-looking brides. Further to the west is my home city of Bender, whose own football stadium looks like this:

The facility above is where I spent a huge part of my childhood, by the way. I remember the entire Eastern Stand (which is now the rubble you see) chanting "Tighina to the UEFA Cup!", to the hearty laughter of the locals who appreciated a good absurdist joke...

Interestingly enough, Tiraspol's greatest moment of glory, pre-Sheriff, came in 1991, when the club (then called Tiligul after some company selling shoddy track suits at local markets) finished second in the USSR Second Division and was promoted to the First...

The triumph was short-lived, because the USSR chose that very moment to break apart, while Transnistria happily plunged itself into a civil war. The very reason I am now in America, by the way.
So, that's where Sheriff comes from. This is the team playing Real Madrid soon...

Never let anyone tell you not to dream big, kids. There is nothing, NOTHING, that positivity, hard work, a secret nation-building KGB plot and an international gun-trafficking ring can't accomplish.

PS. Since lots of folks around the globe are expressing an interest in Transnistria, I will write a separate thread about it and upend the link here.

PPS. Here is an additional Transnistria explainer thread, for those who want to know more about the KGB rulers, the Harem of Ministers, the Language War and where this country sprung from and why it exists.

https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud/status/1431245560099508226?s=20