Florin Andone burns his bridges in an interview with The Athletic

It’s fair to say that Florin Andone isn’t going to be the most popular man in Brighton anytime soon. The Romanian striker has lifted the lid on his loan move to Galatasary with an extraordinary interview with Andy Naylor in The Athletic.

In it, Andone says he doesn’t want to return to the Amex. He blamed Chris Hughton for not playing him enough. He takes a swipe at Glenn Murray, questioning why Brighton’s top scorer of the past three seasons wasn’t dropped to make way for him. And he even tries to claim that his red card against Southampton – you know, the one where he snapped the leg of Yan Valery – was unlucky.

Naylor had travelled to Belgium to watch Club Brugge’s Champions League tie with Galatasary last night in the hope of seeing Andone and Percy Tau facing off for their respective loan clubs. Neither made it onto the pitch, but Naylor’s trip to the Jan Breydel Stadium turned out to be more than worthwhile thanks to Andone’s astonishing rant.

Andone believes that he was never given an opportunity to prove himself with the Albion, despite featuring in 27 games last season and being involved in all three under Graham Potter before his departure for Turkey.

He says he deserved to played more, especially as the likes of Jurgen Locadia, Alireza Jahanbakhsh, Martin Montoya and Bernardo all got a few games in a row. Andone adds that he doesn’t understand why he didn’t get similar opportunities and as a result, he was disappointed with the Albion.

Andone of course is choosing to ignore the fact that every time he got an opportunity, he blew it. When he had the chance to nail down a starting spot away at West Bromwich Albion in the FA Cup, he ended up being retrospectively banned for smashing his elbow into the head of Sam Field.

After scoring the winner against Huddersfield Town in March, Andone was given the chance to lead the line away at Crystal Palace the following week. He got injured in the warm up, Murray came back in and scored a class goal in front of his former worshippers at the Holmesdale Road end.

On the one occasion that Hughton decided to pair Murray and Andone together at home to Newcastle United, Andone got booked after 20 minutes and subsequently had to be hauled at half time before he got sent off. Then we come to that Southampton game, a fresh chance under a new manager which Andone brought to a premature end inside of 30 minutes through his own stupidity.

Not that Andone sees it that way. He said he was unluckly as he always tried that moveme in order to protect the ball. Really though, the only part that luck played in that whole embarrassing incident was that Valery didn’t leave the Amex in the back of an ambulance.

With regards to Murray, Andone questioned why the Albion’s second-highest all time scorer wasn’t dropped. Andone says Murray played badly and didn’t score, yet the team didn’t change.

The answer to that is it did. As already noted, Andone and Murray started just the one game together. That means that Andone’s 11 other starts came at the expense of Murray, so it actually changed 11 times. It’s not Glenn’s fault that Andone was too much of a liability to take advantage of those opportunities.

Andone leaves nobody in any doubt about where he wants his future to lie. He acknowledges that Potter could recall him in January, but that he doesn’t want to come back. Bridges well and truly burnt.

That feeling is probably mutual. Andone was deeply unpopular with this teammates, with that infamous video footage of Bernardo kicking him before the Southampton game being just the tip of the iceberg.

At one point during training last season, he put a ridiculous challenge in on Murray which injured our top scorer. The Daily Telegraph‘s Paul Hayward tweeted after Andone’s loan to Galatasary that his leaving party could be held in a phone box because so few people would care about him going.

Ever since Andone completed his move, he’s seemed desperate to get across the message that the decision was all his and was about nothing more than playing first team football.

In effect, what he is saying is that he thinks it will be easier for him to displace Radamel Falcao from a team – that’s the highest scorer in the history of the Colombian national side and the man with more goals in the Europa League than anyone else – than it would be to start ahead of Glenn Murray, a 36-year-old once of Carlisle United, Stockport County and Rochdale.

We all know that’s bollocks. Andone has been shipped out due to a combination of not being good enough for the Premier League and having a temperament that he can’t keep under control. He might not want to come back, but would we even want him?

You can read the fascinating full interview on The Athletic. If you aren’t yet signed up to a subscription, then we would 100% recommend it. The writing is fantastic – not just Naylor’s about the Albion, but across football as a whole – and it costs just £4.99 a month.

For some context, you can pay for it by having just one less pint of warm, flat Fosters at the Amex every home game.