Sunderland’s dramatic late move to snatch Malick Fofana back after Crystal Palace had seemingly hijacked the deal from them has left plenty of heads spinning — but where does it sit among the greatest transfer hijacks football has seen?

For a while, it looked as though Sunderland had everything lined up to sign Fofana before Palace moved in. Then, just when it appeared Palace had the deal wrapped up, Sunderland came back in and got their man after all.

Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United, Real Madrid and Tottenham have all played their part in some major transfer hijacks over the years. Here is the full top 10.

Fabrizio Romano was hardly out of a Neapolitan nursery when Emmanuel Petit joined Arsenal in the summer of 1997. At that point, the transfer window did not even exist.

The internet was still in such an early stage that most football fans obsessed with transfers relied on newspaper back pages, or Ceefax if they were lucky.

There were no rolling updates and no hourly shifts from ‘concrete talks’ to ‘here we go confirmed’.

That meant the wider public had far less visibility on Petit’s switch to North London, but behind the scenes the story was every bit as dramatic — even if it now feels rather old-fashioned.

“Tottenham put the contract on the table for me, I needed a couple of days to think about it but they didn’t expect what happened after that,” Petit recalled in a 2018 interview with the Daily Mirror.

“When the cab came, he took me straight to Arsene Wenger’s house, it was the first time I met David Dein and Tottenham paid for the cab to help me sign for Arsenal. It’s part of the legend now.”

The French midfielder instantly became a vital part of Wenger’s Arsenal side as they developed into a genuine title-winning force. Daniel Levy will only be hoping history does not repeat itself.

El Mago weighed up his next move after his iconic 10-year spell at Manchester City ended in 2020.

In the end, he seemed destined to join Lazio — only to stop taking their calls despite a medical being arranged, after a late change of heart saw him return to Spain and sign for Real Sociedad instead.

“I learned about David Silva’s transfer to Real Sociedad,” Lazio sporting director Igli Tare said in a statement on the club’s official website.

“I have great respect for the player, but not for the man.”

It feels a long way off now from the time when Mykhailo Mudryk was being likened to Neymar and viewed as one of Europe’s most exciting young wide players.

The Ukraine international featured almost every day in transfer gossip columns during the first half of the 2022-23 season.

He made his admiration for Arsenal very clear and everything seemed in place for the Gunners to sign him in the winter window — until Chelsea suddenly arrived with a superior proposal.

“Overall, it was the same [offer]. Not approximately the same — it was the same figure. The fixed part, variable part, bonuses.

“But if you look inside the fixed part and bonuses, it was completely different,” Shakhtar CEO Sergei Palkin told The Athletic.

“Different time (schedule) of the payments, different kinds of bonuses. Yes, we can talk about bonuses, but these bonuses should be somehow achievable and realistic, let’s say.

“Therefore, in this case, Chelsea was much more serious and fair in some points.”

Given how things have unfolded for Mudryk at Stamford Bridge, Arsenal may well feel they escaped one there.

Chelsea do seem to enjoy a proper gazump, don’t they?

This deal became the standard against which many of the Blues’ future high-profile hijacks would be measured.

John Obi Mikel had actually signed a contract with Manchester United as a teenager, only for Chelsea to intervene.

The saga might easily have turned into a legal mess, but Sir Alex Ferguson eventually stepped back after accepting Mikel’s decision.

“When they saw that [I’d signed for United] they refused to let it go and said they’d fight,” Mikel recalled on TNT Sports’ What I Wore.

“FIFA couldn’t sort it out and get either team to back off, the English FA got involved and then I had a one-to-one meeting with Fergie.

“He said he wanted a meeting with me, alone without anybody for 30 minutes, and that he would be able to convince me to come to Manchester United.

“So I had the meeting, but he couldn’t convince me and that’s how it was settled.”

In pure financial terms, this is the biggest of the lot.

Liverpool lodged a British-record transfer bid worth more than £100million for the Ecuador midfielder in 2023.

In one sense, that itself could be seen as a hijack because Chelsea had been ahead of Liverpool in the talks.

Liverpool’s move increased the pressure and forced Chelsea’s hand, with the London club matching the offer and finalising the transfer. The final choice, though, rested with Moises Caicedo.

“I was talking with Chelsea for a long time. It was impossible to say no to Chelsea, because they were with me supporting me,” Caicedo told Sky Sports.

“In the summer I suffered a lot because it was complicated to leave Brighton.

“They were with me, and in the last moment Liverpool called me but it was [too] late because I wanted to play for Chelsea. It was tough to say no to Chelsea.”

We will let Keane tell this one himself. It is a beauty.

“I was lucky to have one or two options. I did shake hands and I said: ‘Listen, I’ll come.’ [to Blackburn] I think the contract was basically agreed,” Keane recalled during an Overlap Live appearance alongside Sir Kenny Dalglish.

“I went back to Ireland and got a phone call from United. The mistake I made was saying I would sign. Obviously I have no regrets about signing for United.

“Everyone thinks Kenny is a really nice guy. He phoned me and obviously word got out that I wasn’t going to Blackburn.

“He said: ‘Listen, I’m not happy. You shook hands. I said ‘sorry Kenny and blah, blah, blah. Listen I’m going on my holiday tomorrow’. I was going to Ayia Napa.

“I swear he said: ‘I’m going to find you over there.’ Honestly, for the next two weeks, I’m in Ayia Napa and every bar I’m in I’m looking over my shoulder. I’m thinking he’s going to come in and get me!”

Cheer up, Spurs fans. At least once, your club ended up on the right side of a transfer hijack. And that one worked out brilliantly.

By now, everybody knows the story. It is one of football’s most familiar tales.

In short: Manchester United believed they had signed the gifted young Paul Gascoigne from Newcastle United, only for Tottenham to beat them to it by offering to buy his parents a house — and even a sunbed for his sister.

“She should have got a spray tan and I would have a few more medals,” Gascoigne later joked.

“Off I go, and I’m lying by the pool when there is a Tannoy for me to take a call,” Ferguson explained in an interview with the late journalist David Frost.

“It was [chairman Martin Edwards] telling me Tottenham had [signed him instead] by buying Paul’s mum and dad a house in the north east.”

You can only imagine how red Ferguson must have gone after hearing that news.

People now tend to forget that Liverpool were widely considered favourites to sign the Brazilian winger after the collapse of the dodgy Russian outfit Anzhi Makhachkala.

But Tottenham were the club who managed to get themselves organised enough to strike a deal in the closing days of the 2013 summer window.

It was widely said that his move to White Hart Lane was all but done, only for Chelsea to suddenly enter the picture.

Picture the scene like the entrance music of a WWE wrestler. Bah Gawd, that’s Roman Abramovich’s music.

Still, there was an important lesson there for Spurs and Daniel Levy. Surely they would never make the same mistake aga… Oh.

Given the scale of this one, there is a very strong case that it will always remain the greatest transfer hijack of them all.

One of the finest footballers ever to play the game. Arguably the two biggest clubs in world football in Real Madrid and Barcelona.

He seemed set for Catalonia before ending up in the Spanish capital, where he became almost single-handedly responsible for building Madrid’s unmatched mythology for the century that followed.

As much as Eberechi Eze’s U-turn sent social media into meltdown, it cannot really rival that, can it?

We are dropping this one down a place, though, because it was not a straightforward hijack. In tabloid transfer language, it was far from a simple ‘swoop’.

It was more like an uncomfortable mugging that left both sides battling it out in court.

The full story is far too complicated to do justice to here, but it is enough to say it involved a tangled mess of bad feeling, conspiracy theories involving General Franco and conflicting versions of events.

At one stage, it was even initially agreed that Alfredo Di Stefano would play for both sides of the El Clasico divide on a rotating basis before Madrid eventually got their way completely.

The rest, of course, is history.

An all-time classic transfer hijack. And Eze produced two masterclass displays against Spurs in an otherwise underwhelming season. That really has to sting.