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It was only six months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when, on a balmy September evening in eastern Germany, I came across Mykhailo Mudryk shortly after midnight.
This was September 2022 and Mudryk was by then an emerging talent for the Ukrainian champions, Shakhtar Donetsk. He scored and was the team’s major attacking threat in a shock 4-1 victory for Shakhtar in the opening match of their Champions League campaign against German team RB Leipzig.
For Mudryk and his team-mates, the Champions League offered respite from the horrors of home. When Russian bombs landed in Ukraine in February 2022, many of Shakhtar’s foreign players took emergency refuge in a windowless room of a Kyiv hotel, before interventions from multiple national embassies, football federations and UEFA, the European football governing body, hatched an escape plan.
Shakhtar had, at that time, more than a dozen Brazilian players on their books, but many left for safer climes when the Ukrainian season ceased and did not return. Football did resume in Ukraine for the 2022-23 season and Shakhtar, who were first uprooted from their home in Donetsk in 2014 following Russian-backed incursions, were playing home matches in the relatively safer city of Lviv, in Ukraine’s west — though games were still frequently paused by air raid sirens.
Shakhtar’s squad was a shell of its former self, including only one player bought for more than £2million (£2.51m at current rates). This squad was largely comprised of young and inexperienced men. When they played against Real Madrid the following month, their starting team included 10 Ukrainian players, eight who had been produced by the club’s youth system and seven were aged 23 or below.
Mudryk, only 21, all of a sudden became the poster boy of a team whose indomitable spirit and improbable resistance appeared to encapsulate the Ukrainian struggle.
On that evening in Germany, The Athletic was embedded with the Ukrainian side to produce a documentary about their attempts to play on in the midst of war. I briefly spoke to Mudryk and his midfield team-mate and best friend Georgiy Sudakov as they headed out of their hotel in Leipzig in the early hours of the morning. Their heads were spinning after an unlikely victory, the adrenalin coursing through their veins. But, they explained, they also wanted to walk freely in the night, in a place where there were no shelters, no screams, no air raid sirens to force them rapidly underground, to remind themselves of normal life. For half an hour, they did that, before returning to their rooms.
At that point, Mudryk’s star was only just beginning to shine. He was raw, in the extreme, and had it not been for the untimely exodus of Brazilian players, it is unlikely he would have become risen to prominence so rapidly.
This was a player who only debuted for his national team in June 2022 yet by January 2023, following a handful of impressive performances in the Champions League, including against Real Madrid, Mudryk became the most expensive Ukrainian footballer in history. He signed for Premier League side Chelsea, who committed an initial £62m, plus £26.5m in potential additional payments dependent on his and Chelsea’s success.
Chelsea’s commitment to acquiring the player was significant, tying him to a seven-and-a-half-year contract, with the option of another year. Even in the middle of the invasion, Shakhtar managed to attract a bidding war, such was the interest. He had previously been pursued by Germany’s Bayer Leverkusen, as well as Newcastle United, Brentford, and Everton in the Premier League, but it came down to a fight between Arsenal and Chelsea.
At the time, Shakhtar’s director of football Dario Srna told The Athletic: “If somebody wants to buy Mudryk, they must pay huge, huge, huge money. Otherwise the president of the club (Rinat Akhmetov) will not sell him. All the clubs must respect the president, respect Shakhtar and in the end they must respect Mykhaylo Mudryk, who is one of the best players I saw. The price is so big.”
Srna said he rated Mudryk as being only behind Kylian Mbappe and Vinicius Junior in his wide forward position and insisted big money would be required, considering England and Ukraine, it is important for our war support.
This week’s news that Mudryk has tested positive for the banned substance meldonium is a dagger to the heart of Ukrainian football and leaves the player in a fight to salvage his career. The extent of the damage will hinge on the result of Mudryk’s ‘B’ sample, which is yet to be revealed, as the adverse finding relates to his ‘A’ sample, but he has been provisionally suspended by the English Football Association.
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