The 23-year-old winger fired Enzo Maresca’s side past the Greek outfit in the Conference League on Thursday night, sending the Blues to the top of the table.
Mudryk, who joined Chelsea from Shakhtar Donetsk in January 2023 for an initial £62m, threaded the eye of the needle to find Joao Felix, who netted the opener. Then, shortly after half-time, the Ukraine international doubled the west Londoners’ lead.
A few moments later, Mudryk and Felix combined again to score Chelsea’s third goal of the tie. After the game, the Ukrainian marked the victory with a celebratory post on Instagram, which chalked over 100,000 likes and 3,000 comments.
Mudryk uploaded a selection of pictures from the Panathinaikos game, including a cryptic quotewhich reads: “Everything is beautiful at the right time a school bell sounds annoying at 8am but beautiful at 3pm.”
Nevertheless, Felix and Caicedo showed their true colours, heaping praise on their teammate who’s struggled to live up to his eye-watering price tag. The former wrote: ‘Well done,’ while the latter posted three clapping emojis.
Speaking to reporters after the game, Maresca also had a lot of kind words to say about Mudryk. The Chelsea boss said: “Very happy, not for me but for him. We as a staff, we spend a long, long time to help the players; not only Misha but the whole squad.
“Since we started, we are working with Misha and all the wingers to arrive in the box, into the position where Misha scored. He struggled to arrive there and now he is starting to arrive there. That is where we are going to score goals.
“It’s for him, it’s for Jadon [Sancho], it’s for Noni [Madueke], it’s for Pedro [Neto] – all of the wingers. They need to be in position because the ball is going to arrive in that position. We want the best for Misha. Since day one, we are trying to help Misha.
“Probably for him, he is one of the guys that the learning process is more slow compared to the rest but he is improving. I’m sure that slowly, slowly we will have Misha scoring more goals and being important for us.”