Andrei Kanchelskis has offered an insight into Everton’s failed pursuit of Andriy Yarmolenko.
Yarmolenko was regularly targeted by the Blues over successive transfer windows since 2015, only for negotiations with Dynamo Kiev to continually stall.
But ex-Everton winger Kanchelskis has now claimed that the Ukraine international was denied a potential move to Merseyside as recently as last summer.
In his new autobiography ‘Russian Winters’, he reveals that his former club were originally quoted £20 million for Yarmolenko before the price was altered.
“When doing business with clubs from the former Soviet Union you have to look beneath the surface,” explained Kanchelskis.
“There is a story of how the chairman of Dynamo Kiev is bid £5m for a player and that night he goes to the casino and loses £2m. The next day the fee rises to £7m.
“Andrei Yarmolenko could and should have gone from Kiev to Everton in the summer of 2016 but the price kept changing.
“Everton were quoted £20m for the forward and then it became £25m and, eventually, the deal didn’t happen.
“I joked to myself that the directors of Dynamo Kiev must be losing an awful lot of money in the casinos.”