This is an updated version of an article first published on December 25.
“Mykhailo Mudryk is one of the best young footballers. If I don’t bring him to a high level, I will consider it a personal defeat.”
Roberto De Zerbi is a big fan, as you can see. Most of the Premier League teams have been watching him. He’s the player with whom Chelsea have just agreed a €100million deal, having dramatically gazumped Arsenal, who had made him their top target for the January window.
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Shakhtar Donetsk director of football Darijo Srna is fond of saying Mudryk is the best in the world in his position, after Kylian Mbappe and Vinicius Junior. That latter testimony might be the hyperbolic opinion of a club executive trying to extract the best price for his asset. But what is certain is Mudryk — a 22-year-old winger with only a season and a half in the Ukrainian league to his name — is one of the most exciting young attacking talents around right now.
It’s his performances in the Champions League that have offered convincing evidence he is destined for higher things. He was extraordinary in their 4-1 win over RB Leipzig and scored in both games against Celtic, the second a rasping shot into the roof of the net after bulldozing a hole in the Scottish side’s defence with an exhilarating run that has become very familiar.
He was already on the radar of many clubs, and in fact, he almost moved to Brentford in August. But those showings have emboldened Shakhtar to value the winger at €100million (£88m; $106m). “If somebody wants to have Mudryk in their team, they must pay,” said Srna. “They must respect us.”
Known as ‘Misha’ to his team-mates and coaches, Mudryk was born and raised in Krasnohrad, not far from Kharkiv. He started out in the Metalist Kharkiv youth system and spent a couple of years with Dnipro before arriving at Shakhtar aged 15. He was a precocious talent, something recognised by the coaches of the senior team soon enough. But applying that talent was a problem initially.
“He had a big problem moving from youth to professional football,” says Shakhtar under-19s coach Oscar Ratulutra. “He got this opportunity, that opportunity, but he didn’t use it… something was missing.”
“His attitude for me was not very good for a young player,” says Shakhtar captain Taras Stepanenko. “He sometimes didn’t hear what the coach said to him. I tried to speak with him to send him something Xavi, the Barcelona coach, said about the young players. It was a very good interview about young players and how they should have (the right) attitude.”
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He was given his senior debut by Paulo Fonseca when he was 17 in a 2018 Ukrainian Cup game, but after that match he was sent back to the youth team, then on loan to Arsenal Kyiv. Upon his return, he again made a handful of appearances under Fonseca’s successor Luis Castro and his attitude that time was said to be a little better, but he was again sent on loan, this time to Desna Chernihiv.
“Everybody knows his level and everybody just waited for when he will blow up,” says Shakhtar chief executive Sergei Palkin. “The question was when.”
It was when he came back to Shakhtar for a third time that something clicked. “He changed his mentality,” Stepanenko told The Athletic’s Away From Home podcast series. “His approach to training, his attitude… he’s totally different to three or four years ago.”
A big part of that was his relationship with De Zerbi, now Brighton manager but who was Shakhtar’s head coach for the 2021-22 campaign. “Last season, when the staff of the first team really believed in him and gave him this confidence, he appeared,” says Ratulutra.
Srna explains further. “Everybody knows Mudryk is an amazing talent but not a lot of coaches can find a connection with him. When De Zerbi came to Shakhtar, Mudryk was out on loan. He was playing, not playing. The first thing Roberto said was, ‘Call Mudryk, I want to speak with him’. He said, ‘You will become a player with me, or you will not be a football player’. From that day, Mudryk changed things completely.”
The first thing you notice is the tattoos. Mudryk has some prominent ink, one of which is on his neck, a little like Manchester City keeper Ederson. But while the Brazilian ’keeper’s is a cartoon smiley face, Mudryk’s reads simply, ‘Only Jesus’. He also has one on his chest, in green, which says, ‘Dear god — if today I lose my hope, please remind me that your plans are better than my dreams’. As is obvious, Mudryk’s Ukrainian orthodox Christian faith is extremely important to him. He carries religious icons with him to games.
Mudryk and his tattoos could be coming to the Premier League (Photo: Adam Nurkiewicz/Getty Images)After the tattoos, the next thing is the pace. Or, perhaps more accurately, the acceleration. Lots of players are fast, but not many look as fast with the ball as they are without it, and even fewer are able seemingly to reach top speed so rapidly from a standing start. Mudryk seems to belt out of the blocks like a drag racing car and already be sprinting before defenders can even think about combatting him, never mind actually doing it.
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The pace provides plenty of advantages; most obviously in his favourite move, collecting the ball somewhere on the left flank and cutting in at some velocity, like a mirrored Arjen Robben. More than anything, he seems to love taking people on, using his speed as a weapon. “It’s more comfortable for me when I play on the line where I can show all my potential one against one,” he told The Times earlier this year. “I have more space to move to the front and I can create a lot more chances when I play on the line.”
But like many of the best sportspeople, the perception of his talent creates almost as many problems as the talent itself. Take these two examples where two different defenders’ brains seemed to be scrambled by the idea of Mudryk rinsing them.
Against Celtic in the Champions League, Mudryk turned defence into attack within seconds, starting a move from deep on the left then chasing a return pass down the flank. Cameron Carter-Vickers ran across to cover the space…
… and had two choices: hold and try to slow Mudryk up that way, or dive in to nip the nascent attack in the bud decisively. The latter option probably seemed plausible because of the strength of the pass: 95 per cent of other attackers almost certainly wouldn’t have reached it. However…
… Mudryk’s afterburners meant he got there just ahead of Carter-Vickers’ lunging challenge, the defender slid off in the direction of Aberdeen somewhere and the attacker was away. On this occasion, Mudryk ran into the penalty area and squared to his team-mate Danylo Sikan, who somehow missed an open goal. It’s one of quite a few occasions in the past couple of seasons where his fine build-up play has not been rewarded.
But trying to backpedal won’t always work either. Take this (admittedly friendly) game against Fenerbahce: Mudryk, on the right this time, breaks forward from deep and defender Attila Szalai initially moves towards him…
However, Mudryk then breaks inside at pace, meaning Szalai has to change direction, which he chooses to do by attempting to spin 360 degrees to his left…
… but the plan backfires as Szalai falls over, losing his balance at some point during the spin.
Another Fenerbahce defender actually dispossessed Mudryk on this occasion, which will have been a relief for Szalai, left helpless on the turf like a tortoise spinning around on its shell. You could just say these are two examples of bad defending, individual mistakes that could happen against any player. But in these two instances, the errors were forced by either a fear of Mudryk’s pace or a misjudgement of just how quick he is.
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It also provides an illustration of how difficult it is to set up defensively against someone of Mudryk’s pace, but also his technical ability. Play a high line and you’re presenting him with acres of room to break into. Play deep and his close control is good enough to pick through it.
Mudryk has almost exclusively played on the left wing (largely in a 4-2-3-1 for Shakhtar, and on the left of a front three for Ukraine), cutting in on his favoured right foot. That’s where a good portion of his goals have come from, dancing infield before shooting from outside the area. He takes penalties, too, as an added bonus: he’s scored two from three attempted this season.
At this stage of his career, he’s still a little unrefined but is essentially an agent of chaos, raw and incredibly talented, someone you can drop into the middle of most defences and cause panic. This of course serves a dual purpose: defences will be distracted by the threat he poses, so even if his individual moves fail, they have probably taken their eyes off your other attackers, allowing them more room to do their thing.
He’s a dribbler, someone who seems to plot out the most direct route to goal and aim straight for it, whether or not there is actually someone in his way.
That impression, garnered from the eye test, is backed by data from smarterscout. You can see on the above chart that he likes to run with the ball (carry and dribble volume 93 out of 99) and although he is not always great at looking after possession (his ball retention ability is rated at just 22 out of 99), that is part of his high risk, high-reward approach.
He has seven goals and six assists in the league this season, but his underlying numbers reinforce just how strong his attacking contribution is (expected goals from shot creation 87 out of 99) and how strong he is at advancing the ball into dangerous areas (xG from ball progression 84 out of 99).
In terms of his success within those one-v-one duels, his dribbling is not just prolific but successful (dribbling 78 out of 99). He’s not particularly strong in the air or in the tackle, but they are not key parts of his game.
One of his key attributes is turning defence into attack, so he would fit perfectly into a team that threatens on the counter. Take this example from last season with Shakhtar, when they faced Chornomorets Odesa. He collects the ball in the left-back slot, not far from his own penalty area…
… burns past a defender with that ludicrous acceleration, then leaves another on his behind…
… before streaking into the opposition area, around eight seconds after gaining possession at the other end of the pitch.
After this, he displayed his rawness, scuffing his left-footed shot quite limply past the post, harshly castigating himself by throwing himself to the turf, face-first, and remaining there for a good 10 seconds.
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But it’s not just through his speed that he can set counters off. His overall passing needs work but he has a defence-splitter in his armoury, as he displayed against Scotland in Ukraine’s World Cup play-off at Hampden Park last summer.
He collects a loose ball in his own area after a Scotland corner and immediately turns and makes tracks.
But this time, rather than take the Roadrunner route and meep-meep his way into attack himself, he spots the run of Artem Dovbyk as the Scottish defence struggles to regroup and retreat…
… and plays an inch-perfect ball, entirely along the ground, into Dovbyk’s path.
It was an extraordinary ball, one that deserved better treatment than Dovbyk dithering and eventually wasting the chance. Again, you suspect this was one of the moments when Mudryk wished he was playing alongside a slightly higher calibre of team-mate.
So are Chelsea right to pay that kind of money for him? There are a few red flags to consider.
The rawness is clear. He’s still unrefined, but with enough potential and upside that someone may be convinced that, with the right coach, he could already be a star and be more of one in the future.
But that is another point to consider. You don’t have to read between the lines too hard in what those at Shakhtar have said to sense he can be a tricky character to work with. De Zerbi clearly knew how to handle him and his successor at Shakhar Igor Jovicevic seemed to do a decent job with him, too.
Others have not been as successful. Chelsea will hope that those previous examples were more a result of immaturity and that he has grown up now, rather than being indicative of a wider problem.
The words of those currently at Shakhtar offer some indication that it is the former. “Even now in the first team, after each training, he stays on the pitch and continues to work for one, two hours,” says Palkin. “All coaches were saying, ‘Stop Misha please, please stop, Go and relax.’ He is hard-working. God returned back to him everything that he invested.”
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From a purely neutral perspective, you hope that’s right, because if things go right for Mudryk, then those comparisons to Mbappe and Vinicius Jr won’t be too far off the mark.
(Top photo: Mark Runnacles/Getty Images)
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