The Mykhailo Mudryk to Arsenal saga seemed to be going on just about as long as the months we had while waiting to see if Gabriel Jesus would join us last summer.
Both the player himself on his social media and all the gossip columns around the world were full of stories about how much the Ukranian star was desperate to join Mikel Arteta’s project.
But it would appear that Arsenal forgot to tell Shakhtar themselves that they were keen on making a deal, and in fact the Ukranian side repeatedly said that there was yet to be any formal approach from Arsenal regarding Mudryk.
Now it seems that they were not very happy about this “tapping up” and, if you think about it, this may have been instrumental in why they refused to budge on their price when Arsenal finally decided to approach then with an offer.
In fact the Shakhtar CEO Sergei Palkin admitted that he knew that Arsenal were contacting Mudryk nearly every day for six weeks before even making contact with the club, which is the defininition of “tapping up” in anyones book! The Shakhtar chief told the The Athletic : ‘Arsenal contacted the player almost one and a half months before they contacted us. Can you imagine, for example, to have Mikel Arteta, Oleksandr Zinchenko and the sporting director calling you, to have Arsenal calling you almost every day, every two days, every three days?
‘If you talk about Chelsea, they called me at the end of December and asked if they can contact Mudryk because they are interested in him and want to talk with him. I said, “No problem, you can contact him”.
‘When I met Arsenal and they mentioned they had already talked to the player and they had contacted the player, to be honest, I knew beforehand that they had started to contact him. I said, “OK, you start to contact him but first of all you should close it with us”. But OK, we have what we have. We didn’t do a formal complaint. They did what they did.’
So it seems Arsenal fans, and possibly Mudryk himself, were falsely led to believe that it was all a done deal as far as we knew, but now the facts have come out, it doesn’t really cast Arsenal in a good light does it?
Darren N
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