Monument to the first football match in Ukraine, Lviv
On July 3, 1999, the Executive Committee of the Football Federation of Ukraine made a historic decision: July 14, 1894, is recognized as the birthday of Ukrainian football. On that day, a match between the local Sokil team and the Krakow team took place in Lviv, and the hosts won 1-0.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the epidemic of the "dug ball," as the game of millions in Galicia was called, crossed borders and captured the hearts of thousands of people.
The pioneer of Lviv football was Professor Edmund Cenar (1856-1913), a teacher at the Lviv Teachers' Seminary. In 1891, this enthusiast, a member of Lviv's Sokol, published a book on "Gymnastic Games for School Youth," in which he first translated the basic rules of football from English into Polish. A year later, after a trip to England, he brought the first leather ball to Lviv...
In 1894, the construction of a British-style stadium with a football field measuring 100 x 120 meters and stands for 7,000 seats was completed in Lviv (on the territory of the present-day Stryiskyi Park) in the format of the General Exhibition of the province, according to other sources - 10,000 seats...
The public premiere of the football match eventually took place in Lviv in 1894 during the Second Rally of the Polish Sokol: on a warm Saturday afternoon (according to the Lviv Polytechnic Observatory, on July 14, 1894, the daytime temperature was +24 °C), at 17:00, the Sokol teams from Lviv and Krakow, in the presence of almost ten thousand spectators, began a football match on the grounds of Lviv's Stryiskyi Park...
The match was chaotic... Neither the spectators nor the players understood the rules of the game. The players knew only one thing: the ball had to be passed between two posts with flags on the opponent's side. The fight for the ball was fierce. After six minutes of running, Volodymyr Khomytskyi scored a goal, possibly while being offside...
Shortly after that, the first exhibition game of football was over. The football players gave up the field to the gymnasts, who demonstrated their collective exercises to the public. The referee, Zygmunt Wyberek, who was from Krakow, and his colleagues protested in vain...
The author of the historic goal was sixteen at the time... Włodzimierz Michał Chomicki was born in Lviv on April 19, 1878. Later he taught physical education at the ninth local gymnasium. Immediately after World War II, he moved to Poland. He lived in Chocianów, in the Legnica Voivodeship. He died on July 12, 1953. A bronze obelisk with the following inscription was erected on his grave: "On July 14, 1894, the first official football match between the teams of Krakow and Lviv took place in Lviv at the Sokola Stadium. The first goal in this match, and at the same time in the history of Polish football, was scored by Włodzimierz Chomicki..."
July 14, 1894 is considered the birthday of football in Ukraine. On July 3, 1999, the Football Federation of Ukraine officially approved this date. And in 2004, on the 110th anniversary of that short meeting, a memorial sign "Lviv - the Birthplace of Ukrainian Football" was unveiled in Stryiskyi Park .
