As the summer transfer window approaches its final week, the Andriy Yarmolenko situation at Dynamo Kyiv remains unresolved. The most likely destination for Yarmolenko at first appeared to be the English Premier League (EPL) club Everton FC from Liverpool, but Dynamo had turned down a bid from the Toffees (as Everton is often called).
Reports from Great Britain suggested that Everton was willing to meet Yarmolenko’s release clause of £17 million, but reports that Yarmolenko’s contract includes a release clause are false. Instead Dynamo owners Hryhoriy and Ihor Surkis promised Yarmolenko in 2012—after the owners had turned down a substantial bid by AC Milan—that they would allow him to leave the club after he had won a championship with the club. This condition was fulfilled this year when Dynamo won the title for the first time since 2009.
Shortly after winning the title, Yarmolenko made public his agreement with Dynamo’s management. Speaking to the Ukrainian football program ProFutbol he said: “I promised that until we become champions, I am not going anywhere. I kept my promise. The president knows that I want to leave, I have repeatedly talked about it to him. I want to grow. It is unclear what will be the next championship. And I wish that when I am 30 years old I will not regret that I had the opportunity to go somewhere to play, but I did not go. I do not want to regret anything.”
Despite their promise, Dynamo has thus far been unwilling to sell Yarmolenko even though a serious bid was made by Stoke City, (which have since brought in the Swiss winger Xherdan Shaqiri). Stoke, however, never appeared to be a serious contender as Yarmolenko’s inner management circle decided early on that the EPL club did not meet Yarmolenko’s ambitions.
Yarmolenko has since hired Mino Raiola to facilitate a transfer to a new club. Raiola has recently told the Guardian that he does not consider Everton a big club and if he had been the manager of current Everton striker Romelu Lukaku, “[Lukaku] wouldn’t have played for Everton.” Despite Raiola’s negative comments regarding the Toffees, Everton were at one point considered a serious candidate to land the Ukrainian winger.
Tribuna.com now reports that a deal between Everton and Yarmolenko is dead and that the Toffees are instead considering bringing in Shakhtar’s Brazilian winger Bernard, who has so far been a disappointment in the Ukrainian Premier League, and would therefore be a cheaper alternative to Yarmolenko.
Other reports from England suggested that Everton’s offer was turned down because the Italian club AS Roma had offered a higher bid. Yet this scenario is extremely unlikely as Roma’s transfer activities are under close scrutiny by UEFA’s Financial Fair Play watchdogs. This restriction on Roma’s spending is highlighted by the fact that the Italians were not able to pay the full transfer sum for the German defender Antonio Rüdiger, who instead was signed on a €4 million loan deal with an option to complete the transfer next summer by paying Stuttgart an additional €9 million, a measure that allowed Roma to include the majority of the Rüdiger transfer into next year’s budget. It would be exceedingly unlikely, however, that Dynamo would accept a similar transfer arrangement with a delayed payment option with Roma especially because the Surkis brothers appear focused on maximizing a potential Yarmolenko deal.
It now appears that Dynamo are not willing to sell Yarmolenko. This was indicated when Dynamo coach Serhiy Rebrov told Tribuna.com that “I need Yarmolenko here.” This raises the question of whether Dynamo are in fact, torpedoing transfer negotiations with the intention to keep Yarmolenko. On the other hand Yarmolenko now has unlikely allies in Dynamo fans who are reminding the club ownership to honour their promise, with the Twitter hashtag that reads #СуркісВідпустиЯрмоленко “Surkis let Yarmolenko go”.
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