Patrick van Leeuwen: After the newcomers arrived, I really liked how quickly the team became one.

The head coach of Kryvyi Rih Kryvbas Patrick van Leeuwen summed up the first part of the 2025\2026 UPL season.

- You led Kryvbas before the start of the season. Assessing the first half of the campaign, how would you summarize your arrival at the Club and the process that you managed to build?

- First of all, when I arrived at Kryvbas, I immediately felt that I was well received. Even before the start of cooperation, we took care to get to know each other better. It was important for me to understand the club's requirements, and for the Club - to understand what, in my opinion, needs to be done to make these requirements a reality.

I received information about those players who remain in the team. Through various scouting tools, I studied the squad, looked at who would continue working with us, and how this could affect my ideas about the style of play. In addition, together with the club management, I was involved in the selection of new players in the off-season.

This allowed us to strengthen the team with players who could add quality to our work. We started the season with a large group of U-19 players, just to have a sufficient number of performers for the training process. Overall, I think my arrival went well. Together we managed to create a quality football environment - both for the Club and for the team.

- Regarding the squad: Kryvbas started the season with a fairly young team. How did you find a balance between the development of players and the need to consistently score points?

- One of the key tasks that Kryvbas set for itself was to form a team with more young players. The Club understood that this was a new process and that it might take more time. It was also important to find the right type of players for this idea.

The players we added to the team were mostly foreigners, and at the start, relatively speaking, we had fewer Ukrainian performers. The beginning was calm - the expectations were precisely to create a young team. Everyone watched with interest what would come out of the ideas of the president and management, and which players we would be able to attract.

We started with a fairly young squad, but with each match played, this team became more mature. At the same time, we constantly monitored the development of football players, and it is important to understand that development does not only occur in matches. We train more often than we play, so a player's progress is not always manifested directly on the field during the game.

This also led to the fact that we played most matches with a fairly similar squad. Some of the younger players received playing time by coming on as substitutes, and it was during these minutes that they had the opportunity to show their qualities and progress.

Overall, this process went well. For some football players, the adaptation was faster - they received more minutes on the field. Others needed a little more time, not only to get used to the demands, but also to our style of work, because I like high-intensity training, and for some of the players it was a new experience to work at such a level every day.

However, already in the first round of the championship, the players adapted very well, and this gave us a lot of opportunities during the matches - primarily due to the physical capabilities of each player. So yes, we worked in parallel on the development of the team and on the development of individual players. At first, the main thing was to build the team as a whole organism, and only later - to gradually integrate the younger players and give them the opportunity to develop through game practice.

- What strengths of the team, in your opinion, have already clearly manifested themselves in the first half of the season?

- From the first moment, when new players started joining us, I really liked how quickly the team became a single whole. We did not have the feeling that there were separate "islands" within the team. Yes, there were players of different nationalities in the team, but they behaved exactly as a team.

They worked a lot together, constantly communicated, helped each other - both during training and in pre-season matches and sparring. This allowed us to quickly achieve good mutual understanding and create healthy internal competition, which forced everyone to progress every day.

In addition, the championship matches showed the attacking style that we, as the coaching staff, wanted to instill in the team. It gave the fans many interesting moments, and we - a large number of scoring opportunities. It turned out a very interesting combination of talented Ukrainian players with young foreign players. In general, the team grew, the quality of the game increased, and in the first round we saw many interesting features of the new Kryvbas.

- What will be the main indicator of a successful second half of the season for Kryvbas for you personally - a place in the standings, the quality of the game or the balance between the result and the team's development?

- We set a certain goal for ourselves together with the players, and now we are about halfway through this path. Our task is to hold a more stable second part of the season, which should give us the same opportunities for success. This also means that we strive to find an even better balance between team development and the development of each player separately. At the same time, the result remains the main indicator of our work - both the team as a whole and each individual player.

It is the results that show how well the players work every day. And this is what makes decision-making more difficult for me and the entire coaching staff - when it becomes more difficult not to let someone onto the field or not to give them playing minutes. We strive to hold the second part of the championship at the level of the first, but at the same time become more stable so that the points that we lost at the end of the matches are not part of our game in the second round.

Media of FC "Kryvbas" Kryvyi Rih according to the materials Football 24