Chelsea Transfers

[Vesper 28,388]

On 03/09/2023 at 18:39, Mhsc said:

Yes but Enzo/Ugarte would have been a very good double pivot, I don’t think there’s any chance we spend 115m on an extra midfielder if that’s our starting point, it would be a completely nonsensical transfer if we were not in a state of total desperation. 

Ugarte's fee (£51.5m) was less than Lavia's (£58m when add-ons are included)

PSG got him because they offered him a far larger salary than we were willing to spend

[Jype 6,398]

6 hours ago, ulvhedin said:

yeah, under Potter we also had some good statistics (xG...) but we are not passing eye test so far.

First couple of months in the PL under Potter, going from his appointment till the mid-season World Cup break.

Games played: 8

xG: 8,40 (18th in the league)

Goals scored: 9 (14th in the league)

xGA: 12.71 (11th in the league)

Goals against: 3 (3rd in the league)

So yeah, the stats were shite too. After the World Cup till Potter's eventual sacking the numbers did get slightly better to indicate some improvement in the performances but even then the offensive numbers still weren't great compared to the best teams in the league but rather maybe somewhere around 8-10th in the league. It was only the defending that improved significantly in the second half of Potter's reign with both xGA and actual goals against being among the top3-4 in the league but that just wasn't enough when nothing was going our way in attack.

Not overly worried about things right now. The loss against Forest was terrible and I thought Poch's tactics were cowardly (Chilly at LW) but there were still plenty enough opportunities to win the game. If performances stay like this, things are absolutely guaranteed to get better. It was always going to take a bit of time for things to start clicking with half the team being new arrivals and a new manager in charge too. 

Edited September 6, 2023 by Jype

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Chelsea’s £140m Enciso deal, United’s new No 7, Ritchie to Saudi: Imagining the January window

https://theathletic.com/4825257/2023/09/04/january-transfer-window-imagined/

Well, what a transfer window that was! January 2024, we will never forget it. A series of football players were transferred — in exchange for money — from one club to another. It really was memorable.

In many ways, it was completely different to all the windows that have gone before it.

Although then again, there was a surprise twist no one saw coming when Chelsea broke the British transfer record to sign Brighton’s Julio Enciso for £140million.

New Chelsea boss Frank Lampard spoke of his delight as Enciso put pen to paper on a 17-year contract with the option of an 18th.

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“We’ve signed so many Brighton players we’re thinking of wearing blue and white stripes,” Lampard wisecracked, before adding: “No, but seriously, he’s a fantastic player and we can’t wait for him to help us try and finish in the top half.”

It was a busy window for the Blues who also loaned out Moises Caicedo to Manchester United, sold their most promising academy graduate to a mid-level Premier League club for £40million and signed a player from the Bundesliga you have never heard of for £70million. However, they did fail with a late bid for the Amex Stadium.

Chelsea had actually seen off late competition for Enciso from Liverpool, whose last-minute bid of £139million was flatly rejected.

Enciso was said to be keen on a move to Anfield but Jurgen Klopp instructed the club not to bid any higher, reportedly saying: “The day that £140million bids are football, I’m not in a job anymore.”

Elsewhere Manchester United made a late move on deadline day to bring in a striker after the unforeseen struggles of £72million striker Rasmus Hojlund.

After being released by Nottingham Forest, Chris Wood moved to Old Trafford on a short-term deal and was handed the No 7 shirt previously worn by Cristiano Ronaldo, David Beckham and George Best.

When it was put to manager Erik ten Hag that signing Wood wasn’t befitting of United’s glorious history and traditions, the Dutchman pointed to previous January signings Odion Ighalo and Wout Weghorst (combined goals in their 29 United league appearances: 0) and said he was following the club’s heritage to the letter, before having to cut his press conference short as part of the decaying Old Trafford roof was caving in.

United, whose only other January addition was Phil Jones on a free transfer, tried in vain to move on £80million defender Harry Maguire and his near-£200,000-a-week wages. In a desperate attempt to trick Maguire into leaving, United blindfolded the defender and put him in a chauffeured limo while telling him he was going to Arsenal. When Maguire later removed the blindfold and realised he was at West Ham’s training ground, he stormed off in a huff.

England boss Gareth Southgate reassured Maguire that his ever-present place in the national side would remain unaffected, citing the 30-year-old’s form for United’s under-21 side in the EFL Trophy as being “good enough for me”.

As for who won the window, journalists and pundits alike were unequivocal in their praise of Brighton’s business. “They’re a model club,” every single person in the world said.

The Seagulls made a profit of £300million in January but refused to spend big on first-team replacements for the departed Enciso and Kaoru Mitoma, despite the team sitting just two points behind leaders Manchester City.

Instead, Brighton’s two additions were an 18-year-old midfielder from the Bolivian third division and a 20-year-old right-back from Garrison Gunners in the Isles of Scilly Football League. Chelsea are reported to be monitoring their situations with an eye on a possible summer move.

The biggest Premier League sale came not from Brighton but from Newcastle United, whose promising, young left winger Matt Ritchie moved to Al-Ittihad for £200million.

Figures on both sides of the deal insisted Ritchie had been valued fairly, with one senior source saying: “We just can’t wait to see Ritchie line up for Newcastle this weekend. No wait, I mean Al-Ittihad. Hang on which club am I supposed to be working for again?”.

Everton also went big with a signing involving the number 200, specifically the £200,000 they paid Stoke City for striker Dwight Gayle. The fee represented the entirety of Everton’s January budget and meant the club had to cut costs elsewhere, with beleaguered manager Sean Dyche agreeing to stop starching his white shirts to save a few pennies.

Ritchie’s Newcastle sale was a league record fee, while Nottingham Forest broke a record too with the addition of seven right-backs, six of them from Brazil, as part of a recruitment drive that saw 41 players move to the City Ground and 39 leave.

And finally, across Europe the most high-profile transfer involved Barcelona who struck a deal to loan Victor Osimhen from Napoli with an obligation to buy. Barca president Joan Laporta contacted a senior Napoli official with the message “we’ll give you €300million next summer, honest”, followed by the wink emoji.

However, after announcing the loan signing of Osimhen and holding a press conference to unveil the 25-year-old, Barca were shocked to discover they couldn’t afford to register him with La Liga.

[ZAPHOD2319 4,416]

7 hours ago, ulvhedin said:

yeah, under Potter we also had some good statistics (xG...) but we are not passing eye test so far.

If it was just xG, then yes. It clearly is not. Under Potter we were not getting the kind of through balls and progressive passing we are seeing in every game we have played this season. I see a world of change from last year to what we are seeing in these early games. We definitely need better finishing. There is night and day differences in attack from Potter to this team.

[DDA 9,684]

Just buy Toney Jan and close the books. Come summer maybe bring in a World Class winger if possible like a Kvaratskhelia, maybe a GK if possible and let a few more go.

This team would lift off.

[ZAPHOD2319 4,416]

 

[Vesper 28,388]

Chelsea’s summer of sales was unprecedented – but have they improved?

https://theathletic.com/4833721/2023/09/06/Chelsea-sales-pochettino-boehly/

There was a feeling of satisfaction at Chelsea as the transfer window in England closed at the end of last week — and not because, for the third time in the space of 12 months, their relentless recruitment had dominated the market as well as the conversation.

With north of £400million ($503m) committed on transfer fees to bring 12 new players to Stamford Bridge, Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital managed to scale up the expenditure even from the first two jaw-dropping windows of their ownership. But club officials were more keen to draw attention to another figure: £295million.

That is how much Chelsea claim they raised through player sales and loan fees this summer, offsetting the amortised transfer costs accumulated in the previous two windows and creating room to reinforce Mauricio Pochettino’s young squad with Moises Caicedo, Romeo Lavia, Christopher Nkunku, Nicolas Jackson and more.

Transfermarkt lists an incredible 25 departures from Chelsea this summer, and that only includes players who were either in the first-team picture or had previously been out on loan.

The scale of the exodus was nothing less than what was required after a season in which January signings found themselves unable to fit into the dressing room at Cobham and training sessions with two 11-vs-11 matches on adjacent pitches became a regular occurrence. But it is nonetheless an impressive logistical achievement, even for a club with two sporting directors and owners who remain actively engaged in transfer and contract negotiations.

How does the sales push look in football and financial terms?

To consider that question properly means setting aside the fact that Chelsea have lost two of their first four Premier League matches this season to West Ham United and Nottingham Forest, beating only relegation favourites Luton Town at home. It is far too early to know if the squad Pochettino has now will end up stronger or weaker than the one Thomas Tuchel oversaw in the summer of 2022.

But there are other assessments we can reasonably make right now. Namely, how Boehly and Clearlake fared against the three main aims they set for themselves in this window: to raise funds to offset further recruitment, to drastically trim the size of the squad and to lower the wage bill by offloading high earners from the Roman Abramovich era.

Every sale is different, and beneath the headline £295million figure lies a nuanced picture.

Extracting £65million from Arsenal for Kai Havertz can easily be seen as a win, given that the German failed to fully justify the fanfare that surrounded his arrival at Stamford Bridge in 2020 — or even find his best position on the pitch.

Chelsea also negotiated Manchester United up from a £40million opening offer for Mason Mount to a final package of £55million with a further £5million in add-ons. That said, it should not be viewed as particularly difficult to garner a juicy transfer fee for a 24-year-old England international who has been your club’s player of the year twice, even if he does only have one year remaining on a contract that pays him significantly less than he is worth.

GO DEEPER

Mason Mount and Chelsea - how the perfect marriage fizzled out in divorce

Securing good value for players on what the new owners call “legacy contracts” handed out in the Abramovich era — deals with above-market salaries — is a bigger challenge.

Within that context, bringing in £25million for Mateo Kovacic, around £18million for Christian Pulisic and £15million for Ruben Loftus-Cheek is reasonable, even if it is likely that all three perform well for Manchester City and AC Milan. Chelsea believe all three took pay cuts to leave Stamford Bridge, as Callum Hudson-Odoi did to complete a deadline-day move to Nottingham Forest.

In the cases of Pulisic, Loftus-Cheek, Hudson-Odoi and several others who departed in this window, Chelsea also insisted on the inclusion of sell-on clauses that could net them further income in future years. They already benefited this summer from one such agreement initially made by Marina Granovskaia, banking up to £15.5million from Cobham graduate Tino Livramento’s £35million transfer from Southampton to Newcastle United.

The most controversial aspect of Chelsea’s sales were the deals that took Kalidou Koulibaly and Edouard Mendy, two unwanted first-team players without lucrative markets for their services in Europe, to the Saudi Pro League. Boehly and Clearlake were certainly more alive than some of their rivals to the opportunities presented by the recruitment drive of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and offloading Koulibaly and Mendy — and their salaries — for a combined £36million did the club a big favour.

But further deals for Romelu Lukaku, Hakim Ziyech and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang never came to fruition, while Al Ittihad also signed N’Golo Kante, a free agent Chelsea wanted to retain. The Frenchman’s injury record since 2019 suggests they might have been saved from themselves on that front, and the club subsequently re-stocked their midfield cupboard with several young players they regard as better long-term assets.

Some of Chelsea’s uglier outgoing business suggested a greater willingness to recognise a lack of market leverage than in the past, or simply to acknowledge their own transfer mistakes.

Nothing in her track record suggests Granovskaia would have agreed to loan out Lukaku, Ziyech or Kepa Arrizabalaga on such modest terms, or terminate the contracts of Aubameyang or Tiemoue Bakayoko. More likely there would have been disillusioned players kept around for the new coach to deal with, or top-up contract extensions handed out to preserve some hypothetical notion of “value”.

Boehly and Clearlake’s priorities this summer were very different.

Almost all of the players still on contracts agreed under Abramovich and Granovskaia have either been sold or loaned out and, in the current squad, only three players are inside the final two years of their current deals: Thiago Silva, Ian Maatsen and Conor Gallagher.

That is one area where Chelsea’s sales drive ultimately fell short. They were open to offers for Cobham graduates Gallagher, Maatsen and Trevoh Chalobah all summer, but suitors were slow to meet their valuations. When acceptable bids were finally received for Maatsen and Chalobah on deadline day — from Burnley and Nottingham Forest respectively — they came from clubs the players had no interest in joining.

Now the challenge is to re-assimilate players who have been made to feel unwanted and expendable — ideally, in the cases of Gallagher and Maatsen, to the point where they agree to sign new deals — or at the very least to get to January without some or all of them suffering precipitous declines in their transfer value due to a lack of game time.

Selling all three would have meant losing three talented home-grown footballers, and one in Gallagher who is valued highly by Pochettino and has worn the captain’s armband this season. It would also have meant banking almost £100million more in sale revenue — all of which would have been recorded as profit on the accounts — and left the squad closer to Pochettino’s desired size.

Chelsea took the other path with Lewis Hall, loaning their academy player of the year to Newcastle with an obligation to buy for £28million plus £7million in add-ons.

The deal was greeted with understandable dismay among some supporters, and could end up looking cheap if he fulfils his potential at St James’ Park. But it was also a smart way to lock in a significant return for a player who was unlikely to see his value rise this season had he remained on the fringes of Pochettino’s plans. Instead, his sale price will go towards offsetting next summer’s chunk of the amortised fees of signings already made.

There are still 31 players on the first-team page of Chelsea’s website, though this includes academy goalkeepers Lucas Bergstrom and Eddie Beach, as well as teenage signing Deivid Washington, who is being used as short-term emergency striker cover while Armando Broja completes his recovery from an anterior cruciate ligament injury. It also includes Malang Sarr, whom Chelsea’s new head coach does not appear to have met or heard of.

Pochettino admitted prior to Chelsea’s loss to Forest that his squad may prove too big once the bulk of the club’s injured players return, but the situation does not appear to be anywhere near the unmanageable mess that was created in the second half of last season. Boehly and Clearlake are also convinced they have lowered the club’s wage bill by tens of millions, even as they have used this summer’s sales to maintain a relentless stream of new signings.

By their own metrics, then, this window was a largely successful one.

The big question no one can yet answer is whether Chelsea have emerged from it with a squad capable of returning to the club’s modern standards of trophy contention, now or in the near future.

GO DEEPER

Why Chelsea believe their £900m transfer spending is within FFP rules

Edited September 6, 2023 by Vesper

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Did Chelsea really refuse signings based on age?

https://thedailybriefing.io/i/136748695/did-Chelsea-really-refuse-signings-based-on-age

The average age of Chelsea’s new signings this summer is just 20.5. And the average squad age is 22.5. That shows the project has been all about transforming the team and planning for the future.

Chelsea spent £448m this summer, taking their outlay over the last three windows to over £1bn. But they also recouped £295m in sales and loan fees. That part shouldn’t be forgotten either.

Chelsea’s strategy has been to largely look at players 25-years-old and under. And it’s true they passed up on going for James Maddison, who is now 26. But that wasn’t really down to age alone. 

There will always be exceptions to the age ‘rule’. After all, Mauricio Pochettino is also very keen on having Premier League experience. That’s why Raheem Sterling is seen as so important this season.

Chelsea looked at lots of targets, which is normal in a busy window. But they also knew Maddison preferred the move to Spurs. Maddison wanted London, which also counted against Newcastle who were very keen at one point but had moved on prior to Spurs’ bid. Maddison also wanted to settle his future quickly having just had new-born twins. 

What’s clear with Chelsea is they do want to buy young. They view fees paid as an investment not an expense, and this approach allows them to get players on longer-term contracts and for lower wages. The strategy is ultimately reliant on players growing into their price tag.

It’s harder to convince a player over 25 to sign a seven-year deal. And it’s riskier for the club as well because the signing could enter into their late 20s or early 30s and be surplus to requirements and harder to offload.

But I don’t think it’s accurate or fair to say Chelsea will point-blank refuse to buy over 25s. Robert Sanchez is 25 and turns 26 in November, 26-year-old Raphinha was considered (he didn’t want to leave Barcelona) and 27-year-old Ivan Toney is one name Chelsea could yet explore in January. 

The recruitment approach isn’t rigid, so I don’t think we can say any player is ruled out on age alone. But it’s clear Chelsea do prefer to buy young at this stage of their project.

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Twenty-Five 17yos and 16yos to watch who are remotely available (so no Endrick, Lamine Yamal, Warren Zaïre-Emery, Julien Duranville, Paul Wanner, Noah Darvich)  

Winger Estêvão Willian    Palmeiras
Right Footed CB Leny Yoro Lille
AMF Luis Guilherme   Palmeiras 
Right Footed CB Luka Vuskovic    HNK Hajduk Split  
Winger Gianluca Prestianni  Vélez Sarsfield  
Left Footed CB Jorrel Hato Ajax
AMF Jobe Bellingham Sunderland
DMF Gabriel Moscardo   Corinthians (we already are trying to buy)
RW/AMF Rayan Vitor  Vasco da Gama
AMF Claudio Echeverri  River Plate
CF Kauã Elias    Fluminense
CMF Sverre Nypan  Rosenborg
AMF Simone Pafundi    Udinese Calcio   
Winger Pedro   Corinthians
Winger Roony Bardghji   FC Copenhagen
Left Footed CB Matai Akinmboni
CMF Assan Ouédraogo   Schalke 04
CMF Lucas Bergvall  Djurgården
Winger Roger    Braga
Left Footed CB Yasin Özcan  Kasimpasa
Winger Adyson   América-MG
Winger Faniel Tewelde Odd BK
Winger Adrian Mazilu FCV Farul
LB Andrei Borza    FC Rapid 1923
GK Gonçalo Ribeiro     Porto

 

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[DDA 9,684]

What's the talk of us being interested in Nottingham Forests striker??

For fuck sakes man can we aim a little higher. 

 

[Blue Armour 4,256]

1 hour ago, DDA said:

What's the talk of us being interested in Nottingham Forests striker??

For fuck sakes man can we aim a little higher. 

 

Is this striker also under 25 years of age?

[lluubbeenn 136]

1 hour ago, DDA said:

What's the talk of us being interested in Nottingham Forests striker??

For fuck sakes man can we aim a little higher. 

 

Yeah. Lets get someone from Brighton. Heard they are developing great players. 😄

[Vesper 28,388]

2 hours ago, Blue Armour said:

Is this striker also under 25 years of age?

no

he misses the stupid 25yo and under cut-off (it should have been 26yo and under, with exceptions (27yo to 30yo depending on the player) made for GK, CB, and CF)

he would have made that revised cut-off

 

Edited September 7, 2023 by Vesper

[OneMoSalah 8,754]

I mean hate to sound all doom and gloom but if we are truly limiting ourselves to signing players under 25 for whatever reason then we will win nothing anytime soon. Just reeks of Arsenal under Wenger, good team in 3 or 4 years but lose their key players eventually as they don’t compete, rinse & repeat…

Sometimes you need to get a couple of those guys in their best years and very rarely are footballers in their highest level under the age of 25. The likes of Cesc and Costa coming to us in 14/15 is the perfect example when Jose signed them. The season before we were a “little horse” as Jose put it himself, those 2, Filipe Luis, Drogba and the return of Courtois elevated the group alongside JM. Not to mention the signing of Matic in January the year before hugely contributed. Not any of them barring Tibo were under 25.

Exceptions have to be made. If we prioritise signing players who aren’t close to proven in certain areas and just have a constant revolving door of unproven and “could be greats” then we will not make sufficient enough progress. 

Edited September 7, 2023 by OneMoSalah

[Vesper 28,388]

29 minutes ago, OneMoSalah said:

Filipe Luis

was a big bust in 2014/15

only played 15 league games, 937 league minutes, no league goals or assists, and was gone the next season