Chelsea to ‘step up attempts’ to gazump Arsenal for Mykhailo Mudryk — report

A few days ago, Chelsea were rumored to be considering the possibility of hijacking Arsenal’s attempts to acquire Mykhailo Mudryk from Shakhtar Donetsk. That has prompted Arsenal to up their bid for the 21-year-old winger, from a previously rejected €40m (with €20m in conditional add-ons) to €50m (with an unspecified amount in conditional add-ons).

But evidently that’s still not good enough for Shakhtar, because we are now set to “step up” our hijacking attempt. And presumably we will continue to do so until Shakhtar squeeze every last drop out of this situation. There’s still nearly four weeks to go in the January window, so there’s plenty of time left to play these silly transfer games.

Mudryk has been doing his part to get his move to the Premier League leaders — like talking up Arsenal and Mikel Arteta on social media — but we remain in the (rumor) picture and our supposed negotiations are “moving in the right direction”. In fact, The Guardian claim that we will be meeting with Shakhtar sporting director Darijo Srna tomorrow (Wednesday), even. Todd Boehly does love a great meal with wonderful food.

That said, teams dragging their feet have been known to open up opportunities for others in similar situations in the past, so if we do in fact want to pull this off, we might be able to swoop in with a big offer closer to Shakhtar’s supposed £85m demands.