Chelsea winger Mykhailo Mudryk is set to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport after being hit with a four-year suspension by the FA.
Chelsea winger Mykhailo Mudryk is preparing to fight for his career after being handed a four-year suspension by the English Football Association in one of the most significant doping rulings involving a Premier League player in recent years.
🚨🇺🇦 The FA ban Chelsea winger Mykhaylo Mudryk for four years for an anti-doping offence.
Mudryk has appealed to CAS against this decision with process ongoing, as @JacobsBen reports.
4 years would be the maximum punishment possible, if confirmed. pic.twitter.com/rVFdJHsaMK
— Fabrizio Romano (@FabrizioRomano) April 29, 2026
The Ukrainian international has received the maximum sanction following a long investigation into a failed anti-doping test dating back to December 17, 2024.
Mudryk was provisionally suspended immediately after traces of meldonium, a banned performance-enhancing substance, were found in his sample, and the case has dragged on for well over a year before reaching its conclusion.
On June 18, 2025, the FA formally charged the 25-year-old as disciplinary proceedings moved into their final phase.
Since then, Mudryk and his legal team have been attempting to challenge both the findings and the severity of the proposed punishment, but the governing body has now confirmed a full four-year ban, effectively ruling him out of football until 2030 unless the decision is overturned.
Mudryk is not accepting the punishment. According to reports close to the case, the Chelsea forward will now take his appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest legal body in world sport, in the hope of reducing or completely annulling the sanction.
CAS has previously been involved in several high-profile doping appeals, and Mudryk’s camp are expected to argue both procedural concerns and the circumstances surrounding the substance entering his system.
The ban brings another dramatic twist to what has been a deeply frustrating Chelsea career. Mudryk has not played a competitive match for the Blues since November 28, 2024, when he found the net in a UEFA Europa Conference League fixture just weeks before news of his provisional suspension emerged.
At the time, there had been hope that he was beginning to find consistency after a difficult adaptation period in English football.
Chelsea signed Mudryk from Shakhtar Donetsk in January 2023 in a blockbuster transfer package worth up to £88 million, beating off competition from Arsenal and tying the winger down to a long-term contract running until 2030, with the option for an additional year.
The deal was viewed as a major investment in one of Europe’s brightest young attacking talents, but injuries, inconsistency and now this doping controversy have turned it into one of the club’s most troubled transfers of the modern era.
What makes the situation more striking is the silence that has followed the ruling. Neither Chelsea nor the player’s representatives have yet issued a detailed public response to the punishment, while the FA has also refrained from releasing further specifics beyond confirming the sanction.
