The legendary forward of Kyiv’s Dynamo and the USSR national team Oleg Blokhin admitted that, it turns out, in the 80s he could have ended up in the very Madrid “Real”.
“In 1982 we were under Barcelona. It was there that messengers from ‘Real’ arrived. We sat at the table—me, a person from the USSR sports committee, a translator, and representatives of ‘Real’. We talked about my possible transfer to the Spanish club.
I was already 30 years old, and they offered 4.5 million dollars for me. How much I personally was supposed to receive—I don’t know, because the matter didn’t go that far,” Blokhin said in his interview with “UF”.
To understand how significant the amount offered by ‘Real’ for the star of ‘Dynamo’ was at that time, one can take as a benchmark the record transfer of the famous Diego Maradona from ‘Boca Juniors’ to ‘Barcelona’ in the same year 1982: the Catalan club paid 8 million dollars for the Argentine’s transfer.
But for Blokhin everything ended quite differently: he left ‘Dynamo’ only in 1988, moving to the little-known Austrian ‘Forwerts’, and the amount of that transfer was measured not in millions, but in hundreds of thousands of dollars.