Aexone

Where has the Varane speculation gone?

Do people who comment about our youth team not understand that we are a top-class club, and THOUSANDS of players are touted as 'the next Messi' or 'the next big thing', and the chances of Chelsea signing one for <£20m is EXTREMELY small. Look at Dortmund's squad - hailed to have a fantastic youth development system - they sell around 5-10 players a season to lower tier teams because the players simply don't make the cut. No-one can say if Kenedy, Bertrand Traore, Atsu, Boga, Izzy Brown, Wallace, Chalobah, Aina, DaSilva or Loftus Cheek (there are more quality names in the youth teams, they're the first ones that came to mind) will make it as superstar footballers or not. No-one could say Hazard would be as good as he's become when he was at Lille. We even sold Matic to Benfica because he wasn't good enough, but he developed there and is now arguably one of the most important Chelsea players in the team. Development is a funny thing, and the 'rinse-and-repeat' strategy of signing a lot of people, then even 1% of them developing into first team players, it's worth it. The agreement with Vitesse in invaluable, as is the relentless loaning to Middlesbrough. If we had no youth system, we wouldn't have Courtois, or Terry. Then we'd be fucked.

The difference between Remy and people like Gignac is that Remy is proven in the hardest and most competitive league in the world. He scored in France, he's scoring in England. The risk of buying, say, Gignac, who I do like as a player, is that he is completely unproven in the BPL. Remy would be a fantastic signing, especially due to the price to quality ratio. You'd have to pay a lot for the unproven players from abroad, but Remy is going very cheaply for how good he is. £8m for a player that without that release clause someone would pay ~£18-20m for? That's good business to me.

I joined these forums to celebrate Torres' departure.