Interesting article from The Athletic
Does Tottenham signing Mykhailo Mudryk on loan make any sense?
Tottenham Hotspur ended an uncharacteristic summer 2026 transfer window with a fittingly uncommon pair of deals, making two signings from a London rival they had not dealt with directly for 17 years.
On Tuesday, Mykhailo Mudryk and Tosin Adarabioyo, their ninth and 10th arrivals of the window, became the first players to join from Chelsea since Carlo Cudicini in 2009. However, their reception was rather more muted than that of most of the eight men who preceded them.
Part of that was the nature of the moves.
Tosin has been recruited as a backup option to Jan Paul van Hecke as the right-sided centre-back, replacing the popular Kevin Danso, who requested a transfer after being left out for last week’s 5-1 Carabao Cup second-round win against Charlton Athletic and has joined Sunderland on loan with an obligation to bu
y.
The 28-year-old counts as a homegrown player, which is important to help Spurs continue to comply with the Premier League’s squad registration rules, and has made almost 150 top-flight appearances — though he was rarely a starter for Chelsea since moving as a free agent from neighbours Fulham two years ago.
Mudryk, 25, is a season-long loan signing, but the short-term nature of the arrangement hardly scratches the surface of Tottenham fans’ frustration and puzzlement.
First, the guy hasn’t played competitive football in almost two years.
Mudryk was first provisionally banned for doping violations in November 2024, and was only cleared to return to action by the Football Association at the end of July. In a club statement on July 31, Chelsea said: “Advances in the applicable scientific reporting standards for more reliable testing mean that, had Misha’s (Mudryk’s nickname) sample been analysed under today’s technical requirements, it would not have been reported as a positive test, and no anti-doping rule violation would have resulted.”
In the near-two-year period since he last pulled on a Chelsea shirt in a competitive match, where he scored the second goal in a 2-0 away win over German side Heidenheim in the UEFA Conference League on November 28, 2024, Mudryk has been treading water in football obscurity.
The Ukraine international, who Chelsea paid an initial £62million to sign from Shakhtar Donetsk in January 2023, beating out heavy interest from Arsenal and other European giants, spent much of this year training individually on the artificial turf at the Honeycroft Ground, home of Uxbridge FC, a club in the seventh tier of the English football pyramid.
These conditions would be less than ideal if Mudryk had taken to life in the Premier League like a duck to water, but the common view of his time in west London before his ban was that he’d been a big-money flop.
His straight-line pace is enough to give any full-back nightmares — he hit 36.63km/h (22.76mph) in a Chelsea shirt, the fastest speed recorded by any Premier League player in the 2022-23 season, and club team-mate and France international Wesley Fofana said he thought Mudryk was faster than Kylian Mbappe — but he too often lacked the technical security, football intelligence and tactical awareness to make use of it.
He had found some form in the Conference League before the ban, netting three goals and providing three assists in four matches in its league phase, helping the west Londoners progress through to the knockout stage of a competition they eventually won, but he could not translate that form to the Premier League, netting five times in 53 appearances to date.
But there’s another side to his story that is frequently overlooked.
Mudryk signed for Chelsea following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with family and friends still living and fighting at home. There is no telling the impact that had on a then 22-year-old learning a new language in a new country and adapting to a new league. Let alone the pressure of playing for a club of Chelsea’s stature, only exacerbated by the rush of media attention surrounding his move and massive price tag, which is often referred to as €100million, though the add-ons needed to take it to that figure were not considered highly likely to be achieved.
That’s before you account for the conditions awaiting Mudryk at Chelsea, who signed him during the disastrous and brief Graham Potter reign — he played for five managers in less than 18 months, including Bruno Saltor’s short reign — while needing to get up to speed after a two-month winter break in Ukraine.
Mudryk, who had played fewer than 50 times in the top flight back home before his high-profile move, was always going to be something of a project, but his transfer fee and the Chelsea maelstrom he walked into did not provide the conditions for the seed to bear fruit.
Yet what remains puzzling is that Tottenham are now inheriting a project of a player who is now nearly two years older and has perhaps unavoidably regressed.
Mudryk was involved in Chelsea’s pre-season tour after joining up with the club, returning to the pitch as an 82nd-minute substitute in the 1-0 loss to Juventus in Hong Kong. He also played five minutes in a 3-0 win against Milan in Indonesia three days later, but had been left out of the matchday squad for Chelsea’s first three competitive games this season, including a home Carabao Cup tie against third-tier Luton Town.
In an interview with Chelsea’s club media in August, Mudryk said “(he) feels great” and is “hungry” to return to team training and games, and that “he was working six days a week, with proper recovery, with proper sleep schedule, food, everything. Everything was the same, just double sessions per day”.
Yet, it is difficult to imagine he is anywhere close to first-team match fitness.
And with coach Roberto De Zerbi’s hands full in realising
the project at Tottenham, does he really have the time and resources to entertain a vanity one?
De Zerbi is the key to this deal, as he has been so many times this summer, once infamously labelling Mudryk a potential Ballon d’Or winner, having coached him at Shakhtar, and declaring him his “son”, as he often does with his former players, including Van Hecke, whom he worked with at Brighton & Hove Albion before uniting this summer in north London.
With so much needing to be done to turn Tottenham from perhaps the Premier League’s most brittle team into a formidable one, it’s a surprise, to some degree, that he is willing to take on a player who had his confidence shaken at Chelsea and has been forced out of a team environment for so long. Though at least the Italian has a strong connection with Mudryk and should be better placed to help him build confidence than most.
It’s perhaps a consequence of Tottenham shopping above their station.
At various points in recent weeks, the club have been working on deals for Cody Gakpo and Iliman Ndiaye — their first and second targets after securing both Savio and Omar Marmoush from Manchester City — only for those pursuits to collapse. Both mooted deals were fragile and relied on various moving pieces, though Gakpo chose City over Spurs, before staying at Liverpool in the end, while Everton’s Ndiaye did eventually head to the blue side of Manchester.
Though Tottenham operate much more like a big-hitter in the market now than they did under former chairman Daniel Levy, they’re ultimately faking it until they make it — while competing with clubs who are already there.
Could they have attempted to gazump the Sunderland and Crystal Palace approaches for highly-rated Belgium international winger Malick Fofana of Lyon? Perhaps, but that ‘talented wide forward in his early twenties who may or may not realise his potential’ already exists at Hotspur Way twice over in Wilson Odobert and Mathys Tel. Fofana was available for between
£30million and
£35m because he too represents a project, and, having already invested two years in the aforementioned France Under-21 duo, Spurs should continue to prioritise them.
So with the days and hours ticking down, Tottenham had to settle on a roll of the dice.
Perhaps it’s more likely than not that Mudryk will leave next summer, as Randal Kolo Muani did in this one, or their fellow loanee Timo Werner 12 months before, with little more than a polite goodbye. But De Zerbi was not alone in his admiration, with heavy interest from Leeds United — before Spurs did some “food-chain” gazumping of their own — suggesting other clubs around the Premier League think there is still more to come from him.
And if this loan does end as many expect, with Mudryk unable to realise the potential that sent Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta into a tailspin in the winter of 2023 before Chelsea closed the big-money deal, Tottenham can go into the market next summer with the freedom to pursue their high-priority targets again.
The short-term nature of his season-long loan from Chelsea hardly scratches the surface of fans' frustration and puzzlement
www.nytimes.com
