Tudor Baluta moves to Dynamo Kiev on season loan
Brighton & Hove Albion were able to sneak through another deal in the final throes of the summer transfer window with Tudor Baluta moving on loan to Dynamo Kiev.
The Romanian will spend the next season in the Ukrainian capital, where he will taste Champions League football against Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Dynamo have been drawn in Group G of the competition alongside Barcelona, Juventus and Hungarian club Ferencváros.
According to reports, the deal includes an option for Dynamo to buy Baluta at the end of his loan. Should that be true, Brighton appear to have paved the way for a player who arrived for £2.5 million in January 2019 to depart after just one Carabao Cup appearance for the Albion.
Baluta was signed from FC Viitorul Constanța where his performances had already earned him a place in Romania’s national team at just 19.
He was initially loaned back to his former club for the second half of the 2018-19 season and went onto have a starring role in Romania’s run to the semi finals of the European Under 21 Championships in the summer of the 2019, eliminating England along the way.
Those performances led many Albion fans to tip him to break into the first team squad under Graham Potter in 2019-20. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened and Baluta was instead shipped on loan to Den Haag in January, managing four appearances under the management of Alan Pardew before coronavirus curtailed the Eredivisie season.
Despite his struggles, there is something about Baluta that makes us think he still has a future at the Albion. He is versatile, young and technically good, which means he ticks all the boxes of a Potter favourite. Nobody really seems to know why it hasn’t happened for him.
At 21, Baluta needs to be playing first team football for his development and his international hopes. Baluta will be hoping that if he plays regularly for Dynamo, he can reclaim his place in the Romania squad ahead of Euro 2020 (in 2021).
If Brighton have given Dynamo the option to buy Tudor Baluta, then it would serve as a reminder of the element of risk attached to buying young players from Europe.
Some Albion fans have been getting giddy with excitement over the captures of Jakub Moder, Michał Karbownik, Jan Paul van Hecke and Andi Zeqiri; all talented players with a similar profile to Baluta when he arrived 18 months ago.
Baluta shows that there are no guarantees that such individuals will take to and progress in English football. His tale explains why so many Brighton fans were disillusioned with the club seeming to prioritise the future over the here and now during the course of the summer 2020 transfer window.
Of course, Baluta could yet make it at Brighton. Should he perform well against Ronaldo, Messi and co in Europe and help Dynamo to win a 16th Ukrainian title, then perhaps we will see him running the midfield for the Albion in 2021-22 – providing the rumour about the option-to-buy clause is just a rumour.
We hope so, if for no other reason than we have been sitting on a stockpile of terrible Tudor-related puns to use. Tudor slicing through Crystal Palace like an aex through Ann Boleyn’s neck is the sort of content the world needs.
