Shakhtar Donetsk 2011

Coach: Mircea Lucescu

Mircea Lucescu's Shakhtar Donetsk reached the 2010-11 Champions League quarter-finals, the club's best European run in its history at that point, eliminating Roma in the round of 16 before being eliminated by eventual champions Barcelona, who were in the middle of arguably the finest season any club side has produced. The squad blended a core of Brazilian imports — a recruitment strategy Shakhtar pursued consistently and successfully throughout the 2000s and 2010s, identifying promising young Brazilian talent and developing them in Ukrainian football before eventual big-money sales to Western Europe — with Ukrainian internationals, reflecting the club's status as the dominant force in Ukrainian domestic football during this period. Lucescu, a veteran Romanian coach who spent over a decade in charge of Shakhtar, built a possession-oriented, technically gifted side that was a considerable step up from the more direct, physical approach common in Eastern European football at the time. This European peak came before the outbreak of conflict in eastern Ukraine from 2014 onward forced the club to relocate away from its home city of Donetsk entirely, making this campaign a particularly poignant high point given the enormous disruption that followed only a few years later.