ІСТОРІЯ ФУТБОЛУ В УКРАЇНІ: ПОПЕРЕДНІ РЕЗУЛЬТАТИ ТА ПЕРСПЕКТИВИ ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ

The goal is to analyze trends in the study of the history of football in Ukraine, to highlight the most important achievements and to determine the prospects for the study of the sport. The methodology is based on the use of a set of methods – primarily historiographical analysis and synthesis, the general scientific method of typology, special scientific genetic and chronological methods, which involve the study of certain structures in the process of change; they allow us to comprehend the proposed issues within the traditions of “la nouvelle histoire”, the philosophical basis of which is the idea that history is created socially or culturally. The scientific novelty. For the first time, a comprehensive approach to the analysis of the state of football history in Ukraine is applied; the process of development of this area of research as part of the study of cultural history in Ukrainian society is analyzed, including in the context of the existence of numerous works by not professional historians; a general scheme for further processing of the source base and thematic blocks is proposed. The main results. Despite the inception of academic studies on football issues in the second half of the twentieth century, they did not receive proper assessment and support for a long period of time, so they remained isolated manifestations of intellectual initiative. At the turn of the century, as multivariate approaches to the possibilities of knowing the past penetrated the environment of Ukrainian historians, interest in studying the world’s most popular sporting game increased significantly. As a result of these changes, a basic amount of scholarly production was formed, covering primarily two periods: the early twentieth century and World War II, and territorially Kyiv, Odesa, and L’viv. A separate type of product is the work of non-professional historians who have been carefully accumulating a huge amount of information for many decades, publishing it mostly in the form of statistical reference books and individual studies on the history of Ukrainian football teams. In this segment, qualitative and quantitative changes also occurred in the ХХІ century, when a significant number of publications, including those of a comprehensive nature, were published. It was the authors amateur historians who proposed their own scheme of reconstruction of the penetration of football into Ukrainian territory, the first tournaments of various ranks, the creation of clubs, the relationship between sports and socio- political processes, and the biographical dimension of football cultivation.