Manchester United travel to political black hole dubbed Europe's most LAWLESS place

Tiraspol is mafia country and on Thursday night Manchester United go up against FC Sheriff, who are financed by a black market that their owners helped create.

The Moldovan champions may have conquered Real Madrid in the Bernabeu last season, but it was navigating shady matters beyond football that saw them rise to power.

Sheriff, named after the highly influential local company that own them, are based in Transnistria - an unrecognised, political black hole formed in the wake of the Soviet Union which has been dubbed Europe's most lawless corner - and ironclad secrecy surrounds everything they do.

All matters relating to their finances are kept strictly hidden, including contracts and transfer fees paid and received.

The club adopts a policy of total non-cooperation with the media, while the most serious allegations surrounding how their owners make their money range from smuggling alcohol and cigarettes, to illegally supplying weapons to foreign despots.

Sheriff may be sustained these days by riches earned in the Champions League, but they were built by contraband.

Sheriff usually play their home games in the Transnistria capital of Tiraspol, which enjoys a direct diplomatic line to Moscow and houses a sizeable Russian military garrison.

The area has been deemed a security risk by UEFA, so Erik ten Hag will instead take his team to the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, in search of their first Europa League points of the season.

Tiraspol is also a wild frontier of mafia-like activity, with Sheriff sitting king-like on a throne at its murky centre.

The club's 2-1 win in Madrid last year, courtesy of a late winner from the now-departed Luxembourg defender Sebastien Thill, sent shockwaves through European football.

The continent's most glamorous club, who would go on to lift the Champions League trophy in May, were humbled in their own back yard by a side that few could have placed on a map.

FC Sheriff - formed by their owners' co-founder, ex-KGB officer Viktor Gushan, in 1997 - began their hostile takeover of Moldovan football almost immediately. They won their first league crown in 2001, and to date have won 20 of the last 22 titles.

The club's HQ houses a hotel, a state-of-the-art training centre and a fine 13,000-seater stadium that would serve a small Premier League side. It covers a sprawling site the size of a village, and puts to shame the greying, ramshackle outlines that comprise the rest of poor, Soviet-inspired Tiraspol.

Yet for all the team's success, there is something depressingly clinical about Sheriff's football story.

'Sheriff typically build a team very quickly, maybe in just a year,' says their former midfielder Ivan Testemitanu. 'They look for young, talented players from abroad, give them a year or two together, then sell them for a profit. That's Sheriff politics. It's a good business model.'

'Sheriff politics' is the reason not a single member of the side that won at the Bernabeu started the club's Europa League victory against Omonia last week.

'They've sold most of their team this year, which is unusual,' says an anonymous official at the Moldovan Football Association. 'Normally five or six will go each year, but after what they did last year everyone wanted to buy them. They're selling players for millions, which is also unusual.'

The awkward pay-off is that there isn't a single Moldovan player in Sheriff's starting XI, but for a club that is politically divorced from the country to which it is tied, that's a negligible price to pay.

Still, being driven out of Tiraspol and into Chisinau by the war in Ukraine means a chance, at long last, for Moldova to make some kind of meaningful association with Sheriff and European success.

'Our national team haven't done well for years,' says Testemitanu. 'Nobody wants to watch Moldova, but at least Sheriff are doing something to make our football popular. It's a great thing for Moldova.'