Jype

Don't know, but he did. All the other figures are reported in £ so maybe it's just a mistake.

David Ornstein is saying there is a verbal agreement for a €30m fee but personal terms are a problem. At the moment Zouma is reportedly only making around £40K/wk so for his next contract he's looking for a big increase. While he's not a good fit tactically for our team right now, he's still a very good defender and he's proved his talent in the PL for many years so a big pay rise would be more than deserved. Let's hope a solution is found that makes all parties happy.

He hasn't done too badly in his loans, has he? Being a first team regular at clubs aiming for CL qualification in top5 leagues is definitely not a 'negative value player'. Just because the clubs hes been at are skint beyond any hope doesn't mean he's not a decent player for teams like that. People put too much weight into his horrible and hopeless season for Chelsea in 2017/2018 but we have to remember that's only one season of his career so far, the rest of the time he's not been anywhere near bad. Obviously still not Chelsea level but just because a player is not good enough for us doesn't mean he can't actually be a really useful player for someone else. Drinkwater is the definition of negative value, but Bakayoko doesn't even come close. There's a reason why the club have triggered Bakayoko's extension option but are hoping for Drinkwater to just run down his contract.

Aubameyang's positive result was last week and he has since then tested negative according to reports, but they're saying he will be assessed for Sunday's game within the next 1-2 days. Lacazette and Willian are both said to be out for sure, and Partey & Gabriel were already out with previous injuries. Zero excuses not to win it...

Yep. He'd never have been the number one striker at the club in his current level and he wasn't happy being a backup option, so for everyone's sake it was a good move. If he develops enough at Roma the club can buy him back for 'just' a €35-40M net loss due to the clause, but would also be getting a much better player in return than the Tammy who left so if that happens then maybe it's not too bad a price to pay for another club investing a lot of time and resources into his development. I'm sure Tammy himself would jump at the chance to come back if the club wants him to.

... and if you read what I said at all, I didn't disagree with any of that. I did say that once he got going he was a consistent world class performer, but it was very obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes that during his holidays he clearly let himself go a little bit and most years when he got back for pre-season you couldn't really have guessed him to be a top class athlete. I for one didn't have the slightest of problem with that because I knew it was only temporary and that sooner rather than later he'd always be back to his very best, but even you can't claim that coming back from holidays clearly overweight year after year is a sign of model professionalism. Of course players are free to do with their holidays what they damn well please and Hazard chose to enjoy his time off by eating all the things he couldn't during the course of the season. I definitely understand the reasoning behind it, because players are after all only human and it must be SO difficult to live such disciplined life style that most top athletes do but if Hazard did that, he could have been an even better player. Most top players already start some physical training by themselves nearing the end of the holidays so that it's easier for them to get back to business when pre-season starts, but I'm sure Hazard enjoyed life to the fullest till the very last second of his time off, which again I'm not saying was wrong but also not very professional of him. I am just guessing but maybe his lifestyle choices have got something to do with him being injured so much once he started to get older, because it's often said the older the players get the better care they have to take of their bodies to maintain their peak physical level. As for this point: https://www.si.com/soccer/2019/04/11/eden-hazard-claims-he-doesnt-care-about-winning-ballon-dor-he-names-future-contenders Speaking about future winners of the award, the Belgian declared: “In the future, I think Neymar is quite the same age as me, Mbappe is very young, he can be the future Ballon d’Or for many years. But the English generation is very good as well." But, when asked if he considered himself a contender, Hazard was less enthused, proclaiming: “I don’t care about this. I just wanna give my everything on the pitch, if I win, I’ll be very happy. If not, it’s not a problem. I’ll give everything for the club, and we’ll see.” Compare that mentality to the likes of Ronaldo who are very, very sore losers and always do everything they can to win and it's a stark contrast. Again I'm not saying there's something wrong with being a more laid-back person who cares most about his own happiness and that winning in football is not his main goal in life, but what I am saying is that with a better mentality he could have been an even better player. Hazard is definitely in my top5 all-time favorite players and in a way I'm more than happy that he is like he is, because if he had a Ronaldo-type mentality wouldn't even have stayed at Chelsea anywhere close as long as he did. He'd have been in the team for a few years at most and then demanded a transfer when the team weren't delivering consistent league titles and UCL title challenges.

So with Batshuayi and Abraham gone, it's now Marcos Alonso who has scored the most goals for Chelsea from the current squad (25 goals). 😆 Quite a difference to the next placed players too with Pulisic being at 18 and Jorginho/Mount both at 17, so Alonso will stay top for a good while longer too.

Yep. Hazard had all the talent in the world to be a Ballon d'Or winner but if I recall correctly he even admitted in an interview that he doesn't care about being the best in the world and just wants to enjoy his football. In a way that relaxed attitude was what made Hazard tick and he played his best football when he was happy with life in general, but at the same time one can't help but wonder what a player with his natural talent would've been like if he had an elite mentality to go with it. Hazard definitely has an unprofessional streak in him, given how much he likes his burgers and how unfit he's returned from his holidays a bunch of times, but once he found his happy place he was still a consistent world class performer. On the pitch Hazard always gives it everything he has but off the pitch his lifestyle is maybe not the best out there, which is totally fine and the Chelsea fans still love him dearly but he could have been much better too if he had that extra bit of motivation and drive. Pogba on the other hand seems the opposite, he always keeps himself fit and probably trains well too but on the pitch when things aren't working out for him he starts sulking.

Don't know whether it's simply unprofessionalism or just a severe lack of consistency from Pogba but he's already 28 years old so he's not going to change either. What we've seen over the years is exactly what Pogba gives you. Gennaro Gattuso once famously said 'sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit' and those words fit Pogba perfectly. Heck, if we're taking the few best performances in a season as a benchmark then Willian should have been considered a world class player too. On his day he was hands down the best player on the pitch but just like Pogba he ultimately failed to keep his best form going and fell out of the picture for weeks or even months at a time. Mount's peak performance may not be even close to as good as Pogba on his day, but overall across a season Mount's consistency is miles ahead. At 22 he still has a lot of room for improvement too.

I think reason why the board & Tuchel never went after Rice this summer was clear. Like Nizaar Kinsella and Liam Twomey said in the tweets above, Rice is not a player being bought as a 4th midfielder and currently that's what the club needs. Zero sense buying Rice for a huge fee and have him compete for playing time with the same three midfielders who just convincingly won the club the UCL title, two of whom are even tipped to be among the top5 in this years Ballon d'Or voting. Last year the club already spent a HUGE amount of money on Werner, Havertz, Ziyech, Chilwell and Mendy so they told Lampard he can't have Rice too. Maybe the board weren't completely convinced by Rice at the time, and more importantly they weren't fully convinced by Frank himself so they were unwilling to pay a huge fee for a midfielder that the next manager might not rate.Now Rice had another stellar season and Tuchel got interested as well, but not enough to replace Kante, Jorginho or Kovacic who all performed really well. I've said it many times that the time to get Rice is in 1-2 years, assuming he's still available by then, because without him signing a new contract at West Ham the price can't keep increasing forever and there will come a time when he'll have less time left on his current deal and West Ham will be forced to sell for a lower fee (still probably £60-70M but nowhere near £90-100M they seem to be demanding now). Kante is already 30 and Jorginho will be in a few months as well, so Rice could well be a long term target to get in later.

Good deal for all parties, I think. Chelsea will get a lot of money and Tammy goes to a team where he can be the main man. He obviously wasn't happy being the second choice striker and the rumors of him leaving started already with Lampard still in charge, when it was reported he wasn't going to sign a new contract if the club go after another top striker in the summer. I rate Abraham as a player, but he's not quite ready to be the main striker at a team aiming to challenge for the PL or UCL titles. Time will tell whether he can develop into that top player in future but he's not there yet. His treatment under Tuchel seemed quite harsh but maybe one of the reasons he didn't play much under TT was that it was always clear that he wasn't going to stay beyond the 20/21 season so I guess it made sense for Tuchel to build on the players who were actually going to stay long-term. I'd be delighted to welcome Tammy back in a few years if he takes that next step as a player, and that's why the buy-back clause is a good idea. The 80m€ price may seem high at the moment, but if he improves enough in the coming years the club can essentially buy him back for €35-40M (buy-back price minus the fee Roma paid) and he'd come back a better player so that's not a bad price to pay for someone else taking the time to develop him. And if he never develops to be good enough to lead the line at a club like Chelsea, then selling for €40M will have turned out to be great business in itself. All the best to him. I was already planning to watch some Roma games because of Jose being there, but Tammy leading their attack just made them even more interesting.

The talk is that he will sign a one year extension before the loan, so by next year he will still have one year left. The club definitely consider the deadwood like inventory, that much is clear. As soon as the player is deemed to have no future in the first team, the only thing that starts to matter is minimizing the costs and trying to get as much 'profit' as possible when they're finally sold. In cases like Batshuayi the 'profit' is still definitely a net loss, but on the books for the ongoing financial year a £10M sale next summer would count as profit.

Yea, in that interview he definitely comes across as more mature than he was just a few years ago. Of course time will tell if that's really the case or if he just had time to prepare for the interview and came up with answers everyone wanted to hear, but I've seen plenty of Inter fans praising his character and mentality so I guess that's a promising sign.

Sure, but any loan fee will cover Michy's remaining amortisation value on the books. If I'm doing the math right, five years ago he signed for 39m€ (jesus christ what a waste of money) and by 2020 his remaining amortisation was 7,8m€. He then extended his deal till 2022, which halved his yearly amortisation to 3.9m€ per year. And now in 2021 there's only 3.9m€ remaining which was again halved by the extension, leaving only 1,9m€ value on the 2021/22 financial year. A loan fee should be enough to cover that, and if Besiktas pay the full wage (£90K/wk) then Michy won't have any costs for the club this year. And even if the club have to subsidize £20-30K/wk then that's hardly the end of the world because it's still less than £2M for the year and it allows the club to sell for a fee next year, assuming the potential buying clubs have more money by then.

At around 5:05 Romelu says last year when Inter played Bayer Leverkusen in the Europa League that he spoke to Havertz and advised him to join Chelsea. That was Kai's last game for Leverkusen before his move. A true blue, even when he's been away from the club. 🤩

He's on £90K/wk according to reports. I don't really see much of a problem with the extension+loan. Having already spent five years under contract at the club and having extended his deal last year and again now, his amortisation value is down to less than 2m€ for the current financial year. Getting Besiktas to pay the full wage, or at least around £70K/wk portion of his full wage, shouldn't be an issue because he's a high profile signing for them and his salary is pretty well in line with their other top earners. That means Batshuayi will have a minimal 'total cost' for the club's 2021/22 books. If he does well during his loan, and more importantly the transfer market recovers from covid now that the stadiums are getting full again, it should be much easier to sell him for around £10M next year than it is now after his failed loan at Palace and the transfer market still in recession from the pandemic. I've seen people lose their shit over the extension but I definitely see why they've done it. Some fans get too emotional and just want the club to get rid of the deadwood by any means necessary, but by doing this Marina can easily end up making the club at least £5-10M in 'profit' as compared to just letting him run down his contract and leave on a free (that's assuming a permanent sale is off the table this year, because if there was an offer he'd be gone already). The only real risk in this is that he does a 'Baba Rahman' and manages to get a nasty injury while on loan and then comes back to Cobham to recover from the injury till the end of his contract, meaning the club don't get any money and he still gets paid for the extra year.

Reports from Turkey saying Batshuayi to Besiktas will be a loan, and he will extend his contract at Chelsea by a year first. He only has a year left so an extension would mean he still has a year remaining once the loan at Besiktas is over. Besiktas are paying their top players around £60-80K/wk and Michy would definitely represent a 'marquee signing' for a club of their stature so they would most likely pay him around the same, and the loan fee would cover the rest. Palace, Dortmund, Valencia have all paid loan fees varying from 1,5-3m€ for Michy before so getting around the same for this loan shouldn't be too much of a problem. His amortisation value is already close to zero after 5 years on the books so with a loan fee and Besiktas paying a part of his wages it should be just enough to cover for his full salary so the club 'break even' with Michy for the 21/22 season. At the moment, aside from the very few top clubs, there isn't really any money in the transfer market to be spent. By doing the good old 'extension + loan' trick the club are banking on the transfer market recovering from covid enough so there's someone willing to buy him next year for around 10m€.

Supposedly Romano's report was for Lukaku's net wage (12m€/y) so the gross salary before taxes would be somewhere above 300K/wk. But reports on wages are most of the times unreliable because we don't know how much of it is tied to performance bonuses (both personal and team success) and some reports are net, some are gross etc. Either way I wouldn't be surprised if Lukaku was the club's top earner now, because he signed the contract at his prime age (28) and moved for a club record fee so if he got an average wage then him and his agent have done a bad job. If I had to guess his basic wage should be around £300K/wk (similar to Kante's wage) and possibly some bonuses taking it higher if he's a big success. That kind of salary doesn't totally break the club's wage hierarchy and if he bangs in 35 goals a season and gets some 100K/wk more with bonuses added up I doubt anyone really cares because it would most likely mean the team have had big success on the pitch as well.

I mean, on average most people believe the media on transfer fees, player salaries etc. which are not disclosed either but have enough people close to the action to make the reports believable. Also, some of the contracts have leaked over the last few years. For example, Mino Raiola's agent commission for Pogba to Utd was around €22M from Manchester United and €27M from Juve, for an overall agent commission of a whopping €49M. This was confirmed by the official documents that got leaked by Der Spiegel. If he got that much from one high profile deal, it's totally believable that he might get similar for Haaland deal and other big transfers as well.

10% commission on average, but for the most in-demand players it's definitely more. It's been reported pretty much as a fact that Mino is looking to bag €40M for Haaland's next move so whichever way you put it he gets a lot more than 10%. And for example Denzel Dumfries just moved from PSV to Inter Milan for a transfer fee of €12M and it's reported that Raiola got an €8M commission as well, making the total cost around €20M and Raiola getting 40% from that. Sure there are a few other of these so-called 'super agents' who are just as much scumbags as Mino Raiola but that doesn't make Raiola any less rotten knowing there are a few other individuals who are just as bad as him, with Jorge Mendes being the main one. However, not even close to all top players are represented by these 'super agents' so in those cases the fees are probably more reasonable, and that's why the clubs prefer working with people other than the likes of Raiola if at all possible. The amount of work needed by the agent (paperworks, negotiation, contracts, travelling etc.) is pretty much a constant whether it's a €5M transfer or a €150M transfer so why should the agents get an uncapped fee for doing the same work just because they feel like demanding more money for their biggest cash cows? FIFA need to start regulating the agent business more, it's starting to get real shady. In the past when part-ownerships were still a thing the agents may have even had a stake in the players and they made their money from that, but now that the part-ownership system was abolished the agent fees have gotten out of hand. In a way it's still like the players are in part owned by the agent if they bag 40% (see Dumfries) of the total transaction cost and can dictate where the player moves by seeing who is willing to pay the ridiculously inflated agents fees.

Well, I can only speak for myself but I consider to team play significantly better football (and in my opinion get better results) when Werner plays. Last season, even if he didn't score a lot himself, he still created a lot of goals by running at defenders and passing in the box for someone else to score an easy tap-in. If I didn't know about Werner's prolific goalscoring record in the Bundesliga and only saw him for what he produced last season I'd have been reasonably happy with the output (close to 30 G+A overall). But knowing he's previously shown what it takes to score +30 goals a season he's been a slightly frustrating figure to watch. Be interesting to see whether Tuchel now figures out a way to get Werner firing when playing together with Lukaku, or if the arrival of Romelu will drop him to the bench and he has to play the role of an impact sub.

I didn't say Werner is not good enough to play in the team, quite the contrary really. Despite all the memes and banter I've fully stood by Werner and value his contribution a lot even though so far he's been shite at scoring goals, but that doesn't change the fact that as a leading striker he's not been anywhere near good enough. He's at his best when he plays alongside another striker so he can make use of his best asset and run at defenders, but if he's played up front by himself he gets marked out of the game by the oppositions big strong CBs. I could see Werner benefiting a lot from Lukaku's arrival. In Tuchel's 3-4-3 there are no wingers btw.

Mbappe doesn't have an agent, he's represented by his mum and dad. It's really similar to Hazard -> Real Madrid actually. No other team even considered making a bid for him because they knew his preferred destination.

He's not though. He's a forward who's being played on the wing because he's not good enough to lead the line by himself.

Mbappe has had his sights set on Real Madrid for 1-2 years now, it's pretty much an open secret that he's going there next. Screaming for the club to sign him won't change that.