Pundit claims 22-year-old Chelsea star is not a Graham Potter signing

Paul Merson claims Mykhaylo Mudryk is not a Graham Potter signing at Chelsea

As per his column on Sky Sports, Football pundit Paul Merson claims that Chelsea’s January signing Mykhaylo Mudryk was not a player wanted by manager Graham Potter.

In the middle of the January window, Chelsea broke their neck to beat Arsenal in the transfer race to sign the highly-rated 22-year-old from Shakhtar Donetsk. The fee of this deal is around £88.5m.

Since then, the Ukrainian international has played 251 minutes of football for Chelsea and only came off the bench in their recent defeats to Tottenham Hotspur and Southampton.

While that can be just down to Potter slowly integrating him into the team, Merson feels otherwise. Here’s the snippet from his column on this topic (h/t Sky Sports):

“Mykhailo Mudryk is an £88m signing sitting on the bench, it tells you he’s not Potter’s player. If he was his player and he would have gone to the board and said he needed him, and would have to play him.”

With the way Chelsea spent in the January window – Potter’s first as the Blues boss, it does seem like the manager did not have much of a say in them. It is because no manager would want his/her club to sign eight new players in the middle of the season.

Once that happens, it becomes a nightmare for them to manage such a massive squad. We have seen the difficulty of that when Potter had to leave out the only senior striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang from the Champions League squad for the knockout stages to adjust one of the new signings.

With regards to Mudryk, if he is not a Potter player, then Chelsea are foolish to spend that type of money on him and simultaneously continue to back the manager despite all the negative results on the field. These things do not add up.

More Chelsea News:

• Chelsea could hire Brentford boss Thomas Frank if Graham Potter is sacked
• Inter Milan chief confirms Romelu Lukaku will return to Chelsea in the summer
• Shakhtar sporting director confident that Mykhaylo Mudryk will be a success at Chelsea

And as suspected, if the manager has very little to no say in how the squad is reshuffling in transfer markets, he might as well resign from the job right away. We know certain things are not in their control, but transfers are something that has to be done after their approval. Either way, we are just speculating at this stage. Let’s hope it is not the case.