Pizy

Sterling seems like the type of player who wouldn’t want to leave England. Doesn’t he have about 15 kids? I highly doubt he’d want to uproot such a big family and move to a country where they don’t speak the language etc. So I think it’s probably much easier to sell Mudryk. Ideally both would go but Sterling’s wages and desire to leave are surely huge obstacles.

Should be pretty straightforward for us to simply offer the same money, maybe just a little more, for Felix that we did for Samu and get this Gallagher swap sealed. Going from Samu to João Felix is a colossal upgrade as people were saying last night. Just in terms of raw talent and technical ability it’s not close. Just being able to turn to Felix instead of Mudryk or Sterling raises both our floor and our ceiling.

Gallagher deal falling apart after he has been posted walking around Atleti’s stadium by their social media account would be disastrous. If we’ve fucked up 3 different deals here Atleti will never want to deal with us again.

Yes, but they haven’t said anything about the situation since those initial tweets last night. I just saw Ben Jacobs and Nizaar both tweet at the same time that Omorodion is still unlikely but not dead. That says to me that they’ve been told by someone who would know. We all await another Ornstein bomb, I guess. But I’m now expecting “after further working on terms, Chelsea and Omorodion have come to an agreement.”

So I wake up to now see the journalists being briefed that the Omorodion deal ISN’T actually competently dead? Damnit. Shouldn’t have gotten too excited. 😞

Can’t imagine how we’d make that work unless there are 2-3 big outgoings.

Watching Felix’s Barca highlights I didn’t realize he was as good as he was. There’s a reason Barca fans really wanted him back for this coming season.

Felix & Osimhen are both on well north of £200k per week, yes? There’s no way we would get both under this new wage cap we’ve implemented. That is unless we can shift several massive earners like Lukaku, Sterling, and Chilwell… 👀 Really, though, we surely have to be selling off not just one of our current wide attackers but 2. They HAVE to go. We have Estevão and Paez coming next summer, ffs. We’d have like 20 attacking mids on our books if nobody is sold!

Felix’s excellent technical quality and ability to link play with quick thinking, one touch play makes WAY, WAY more sense than a giant #9 like Omorodion who has Lukaku like touch and skill. Him linking with Palmer, Neto, etc is already making me excited. His end product isn’t great of course, but we don’t need him to be our main source of goals.

This would surely rule out Osimhen btw, right? Felix would be on huge wages.

BRO, WTF IS GOING ON?! 🤣🤣🤣 I wanted us to keep João Felix when we had him so I’d be delighted to have him back instead of Omorodion.

So he would t accept the wages we offered? Is that the issue?

If true, I wonder what happens with Gallagher? Aren’t they using the money we were giving them for Samu to buy Gallagher? Or would this effect their Alvarez deal?

Would be a huge blessing in disguise if Omorodion indeed doesn’t come, we get Osimhen, and then keep Guiu who looks more polished than Samu at this point.

This is why I hope Maresca starts Tosin and Colwill together. Develop that relationship as our starting pair.

With the way the Pedro Neto deal came out of absolutely nowhere and was reported as a done deal in 1 day, I wouldn’t be shocked at all if we do the same thing with a striker. But I don’t think it’ll be Osimhen. I think it’ll be……Ivan Toney. That’s my prediction. The unfortunate side effect will surely be Guiu going out on loan. He deserves to stay.

Biggest concern for me (and keep in mind that I haven’t actually watched a single one of these preseason matches) is all the stuff I’ve read this summer about how poor Colwill has looked. He genuinely looked like a future world class CB who would lock down an undisputed place at the back for us for a decade or more when he returned from Brighton. We fought off multiple suitors that were after him for that exact reason. We gave him a big, long contract. But apparently he has been poor this summer. I wonder what the deal is? His best qualities when he was in the Brighton team were his composure/class on the ball and his passing. So what happened?

Biggest positive by far out of that preseason is that Lavia, Nkunku, and even Fofana survived injury free. They badly needed a nice run of games to get back into the rhythm of playing consecutive matches. Lavia & Nkunku will be HUGE for us this season if it stays this way.

I think we just need to be patient and expect things to take a bit before we see everything click. But the signs are there that Maresca CAN get us playing good football. I’m much more confident in these ideas we’re seeing than I was with Poch who had much longer and never created anything resembling a specific style. If we can get Palmer, Nkunku, Neto, and Jackson all cooking and clicking with one another I think we’ll be great to watch and SUPER dangerous.

—————-Sanchez—————— Gusto——Fofana———Colwill ————Lavia———Cucu_———- ———KDH_————-Enzo———— Madueke——————————Mudryk ——————Guiu_————————

This XI from Maresca looks like a “let me have one last look in preseason at a few of these players” sort of team. Specifically, this is one last chance to impress from Sanchez, Mudryk, Guiu, and Fofana before we start making some decisions about if some of them will be sold/loaned/benched. Some expected him to just go with our strongest possible XI as a proper warm up for next week but he clearly wants another look at some of these guys. So people shouldn’t freak out if we lose again since this absolutely isn’t our best XI.

Watching several Chelsea YouTubers and all over Chelsea Twitter a lot of them seem to feel that Osimhen would come here and put up numbers like RVP when he went to United, Haaland at City, or Suarez & Salah at Liverpool. Like 25-30 PL goals and 40-50 across all comps. But I don’t think he’s anywhere near that level. That’s why I’m glad the club isn’t just going “fuck it” and spending mega money on him. Be nice to have for £50m + Lukaku or on loan with buy obligation for something reasonable like £50-60m.

Yeah, that one spectacular season where he spearheaded Napoli’s title win a couple of years ago has kind of skewed the general PL fan into thinking Osimhen is someone he isn’t in reality. He’s an amazing poacher and can definitely score a lot of “fox in the box” type goals and he’s really good in the air. But as you say, he isn’t a Kane at his best who is not merely finisher but also a playmaker. And he’s also not one of those #9’s that’s going to score loads of unbelievable bangers from crazy angles or from outside the box like an RvP/Luis Suarez/Sergio Aguero. I think if he came to the PL he’d be much like Haaland but not quite as good. Someone who scores all the easy chances when they come to him but he isn’t going to be involved much throughout many matches in terms of general play.

Most of the big teams don’t really have a burning need for a super expensive #1 striker at the moment. City are set there, Bayern are set there, Barca are, Real Madrid don’t even play with a traditional striker, and United have Hojlund + Zirkzee now. That really just leaves PSG and ourselves as well as Arse as a dark horse. I don’t think big teams are staying away because they don’t rate him highly, it’s just bad timing for a marquee striker to be available. Well, that plus his huge wages.

Man, I hope the Osimhen stuff doesn’t drag until the deadline. If the club still wants another striker after Omorodion but are refusing to pay Osimhen’s wages then just move on ASAP to the next target. Ordinarily, you’d think this would be a super simple deal to get done. We have someone Napoli’s manager desperately wants, that player badly wants to go there, and Napoli have something we really want which is an undisputed number 1 striker. I don’t think the transfer fee is much of an issue any longer because Napoli have significantly lowered their asking price by all accounts. So this big holdup has to be our club desperately trying to get Osimhen to lower his wage demands to something they deem reasonable. What we absolutely DON’T want is this dragging all the way to the deadline, having no real fall back option, and then PSG or Arse jump in and snag him.