Chelsea Transfers

[Strike 7,761]

1 minute ago, mkh said:

The transfer came out of nowhere according to Basler fans Veiga stagnated this season!!!

I'm all for adding a few players in their prime to round out the squad we have. Can't afford another season where we stagnate, are inconsistent because we are playing young players all over the pitch. 

 

[ZAPHOD2319 4,942]

 

[Magic Lamps 11,692]

1 hour ago, mkh said:

The transfer came out of nowhere according to Basler fans Veiga stagnated this season!!!

That’s also what I heard. He was pretty meh all season which is weird cos we tend to buy these youngsters on form usually. Real head scratcher this one. But I doubt he was bought as midfielder, rather as CB/LB cover 

[TheHulk 2,636]

 

[LAM09 7,085]

A market that has so much potential. Let's hope we take full advantage of that.

[Tomo 21,751]

6 minutes ago, LAM09 said:

A market that has so much potential. Let's hope we take full advantage of that.

Good excuse to show this.

Arsenal of that era summed up in seconds.

[Duppy Conqueror 1,584]

4 minutes ago, LAM09 said:

A market that has so much potential. Let's hope we take full advantage of that.

Afcon puts me off abit.more specifically the fact teams lose players for a month or more during the season.but should scout globally rather than just 3 south american countries.

[LAM09 7,085]

4 minutes ago, Duppy Conqueror said:

Afcon puts me off abit.more specifically the fact teams lose players for a month or more during the season.but should scout globally rather than just 3 south american countries.

They have had discussions to move it multiple times, but FIFA keep doing everything in their power to prevent that from happening - Afcon 2025: Finals set for December 2025 and January 2026 in Morocco - BBC Sport

Edited July 5, 2024 by LAM09

[Duppy Conqueror 1,584]

2 hours ago, Strike said:

Why buy him when there's already Lesley, Santos, Casadei who are DMs waiting to be assessed?

Could be that Maresca wants to assess him at the other positions he appears to be able to play.

Presumably after assessing if his birth certificate is legit.

[Pizy 19,249]

I don’t think this kid from Basel is being thought of at all as a pure midfielder who competes with Lavia/Ugo/Santos etc. 

I think he’s 100% being brought in as a direct fallback option to the role Calafiori would’ve played. Inverted LB/LCB.

[Reddish-Blue 2,663]

7 hours ago, Strike said:

Arsenal are getting a serious upgrade. We are experimenting with another 20 year old. 

I'm wondering whether we can't pay that sort of fee due to PSR/FFP concerns.   The only real sale we've completed is Maatsen and even then we wasted 19 million on Kellyman.   I was expecting Broja and Gallagher to be sold to help fund a solid CB. 

[Reddish-Blue 2,663]

1 hour ago, Pizy said:

I don’t think this kid from Basel is being thought of at all as a pure midfielder who competes with Lavia/Ugo/Santos etc. 

I think he’s 100% being brought in as a direct fallback option to the role Calafiori would’ve played. Inverted LB/LCB.

Calafiori would have been a guaranteed starter, this kid will either be on the bench or go on loan somewhere for 1-2 seasons.   That's not a fall back option.  😆

[YorkshireBlue 3,341]

6 minutes ago, Reddish-Blue said:

I'm wondering whether we can't pay that sort of fee due to PSR/FFP concerns.   The only real sale we've completed is Maatsen and even then we wasted 19 million on Kellyman.   I was expecting Broja and Gallagher to be sold to help fund a solid CB. 

Pretty sure mount money fell under this PSR as well

[Pizy 19,249]

26 minutes ago, Reddish-Blue said:

Calafiori would have been a guaranteed starter, this kid will either be on the bench or go on loan somewhere for 1-2 seasons.   That's not a fall back option.  😆

Calafiori was not going to be a guaranteed starter imo. Seems a lot of people here have just completely written off Colwill and want to replace him already. Or were you thinking he was going to be our starting LB replacing Cucu? Even that was far from guaranteed with the way Cucu has been playing.

Fabrizio has given every indication that this kid will the the “versatile left footed defender” that we’ve wanted. Doesn’t seem like he’ll be one for the loan army.

[Vesper 31,037]

Arsenal have agreement with Riccardo Calafiori, trying to beat out Chelsea

https://thedailybriefing.io/i/146302702/arsenal-have-agreement-with-riccardo-calafiori-trying-to-beat-out-Chelsea

Arsenal have an agreement with Riccardo Calafiori, the clubs are negotiating. Arsenal have presented a first offer, I can't say for how much but it's a high offer. Arsenal are pushing to get the deal done quickly, in order to get ahead of the other teams that are interested in Calafiori. First and foremost Chelsea, and then a little way behind, Juventus. There's been an auction for him, and ultimately, Juve cannot reach the figures that the Premier League can offer.

Arsenal will attempt to speed things through as quickly as they can, Juventus have started looking at other options to strengthen their defence, as evidenced by their offer for Buongiorno, as it looks difficult for them to sign Calafiori.

[Vesper 31,037]

Several clubs in the race for Todibo

https://thedailybriefing.io/i/146270218/several-clubs-in-the-race-for-todibo

I'm not aware that Jean-Clair Todibo wasn’t interested in a move to West Ham.

I understand that West Ham were never going to bid for him without guarantees on the player side, and though he was keen on the move the problem was on the price - which is still considered to be too high.

The race for Todibo remains open, and there are several clubs interested.

[Vesper 31,037]

Chelsea agree deal to sign Renato Veiga from FC Basel

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5618375/2024/07/05/Chelsea-transfers-renato-veiga/

Chelsea have agreed a deal with FC Basel to sign Renato Veiga.

A fee of €14million has been agreed between the two clubs with no sell-on clause.

A medical has been scheduled in London with the 20-year-old Portugal Under-20 international expected to sign a contract until 2032 with the Stamford Bridge club.

A left-sided centre-back, left-back or a No 6 in midfield, Veiga is expected to be used an inverted full-back and is viewed as a perfect fit for Enzo Maresca’s system.

Maresca, formerly of Leicester City, replaced Mauricio Pochettino in charge earlier this summer.

Veiga made 26 appearances in all competitions for FC Basel last season, scoring two goals and adding a single assist.

Should a deal progress he will join Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Tosin Adarabioyo, Marc Guiu and Omari Kellyman as new signings at Chelsea this summer.

GO DEEPER

Chelsea's aggressive youth recruitment means days of signing players at peak are over

Why Chelsea are signing Veiga

Analysis by Chelsea correspondent Liam Twomey

The acquisition of Veiga is another sign of Maresca’s influence on the recruitment strategy led by Chelsea’s co-sporting directors Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley, following the arrival of Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall from Leicester City.

Veiga, unlike Dewsbury-Hall, is not a player Maresca has worked with before. He does, however, fit a specific profile that the Italian is looking for to help implement his style of play at Stamford Bridge: a left-sided defender who can invert from full-back into a defensive midfield role when Chelsea are in possession.

Marc Cucurella is also viewed as capable of performing that role, having been deployed in a similar manner by Maresca’s predecessor Mauricio Pochettino in the final stretch of last season. Veiga, however, offers a more aerially imposing option: at 6ft 3in tall (190cm), he addresses what some have identified as a relative lack of height in Chelsea’s squad.

Maresca will assess Veiga in pre-season and judge whether he is first-team ready or requires a loan spell to aid his development. He is essentially one year behind Riccardo Calafiori, who became a breakout star for Bologna last season after moving back to Italy from Basel in the summer of 2023 and has been widely touted as a transfer target for Chelsea in recent weeks.

Veiga’s modest transfer fee reflects that. Chelsea consider him an excellent value proposition, particularly considering that he is taller than Calafiori and has a cleaner injury history.

Above all he is the type of flexible, multi-positional player increasingly prized by progressive, possession-focused coaches like Maresca.

 

Edited July 6, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 31,037]

Chelsea’s midfield: Where does Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall fit in, and where does it leave Conor Gallagher?

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5614215/2024/07/04/chelseas-midfield-where-does-dewsbury-hall-fit-in-and-where-does-it-leave-conor-gallagher/

For better or worse, the bold, new Enzo Maresca era at Chelsea has its symbol: Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, the Italian’s biggest individual success story in Leicester City’s run to promotion from the Championship last season and a £30million signing who promises to shake up the midfield pecking order at Stamford Bridge.

Dewsbury-Hall had a breakthrough 2023-24 campaign, registering 12 goals and 14 assists in 44 league appearances — the first time he had got to double figures in either category in a single professional season. Despite ostensibly being a No 8, he emerged as the secondary goal threat in Maresca’s revamped, post-relegation Leicester team, scoring only three fewer non-penalty goals than Jamie Vardy.

“Kiernan is probably the player that, since we have started, has improved more than the rest,” Maresca said of Dewsbury-Hall last November, five months after he got the Leicester job.

“He has the calmness that that kind of player needs. He’s fantastic with the ball, he knows when to attack and what to give the team. He is so dangerous near the box and has the quality to score or assist from anywhere.”

Dewsbury-Hall may not have been targeted solely because of Maresca — a productive 25-year-old available at that price will always be an attractive value proposition to Chelsea’s co-owners Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly — but given his pre-existing relationship with their new head coach and intimate knowledge of his tactical system after their year together in the second division, expect him to play a lot.

This necessarily means that others in the Cobham midfield stable are going to play less.

So, who is most vulnerable to losing minutes on the pitch as a result of Dewsbury-Hall’s arrival? Let’s take a closer look…

The first thing to establish is the role Dewsbury-Hall played at Leicester under Maresca, who favoured a 4-3-3 formation which morphed into a 3-2-4-1 arrangement in possession, with one full-back inverting into midfield and the two midfield No 8s pushing high up ahead of the ball.

Dewsbury-Hall was the left No 8, tasked with providing incisive passes, direct runs and a supplementary scoring threat from the left half-space. Sometimes this entailed drifting into more of a No 10 position, receiving the ball on the half-turn and then playing a pass through to one of Leicester’s attackers — as he does here for the assist on a goal by Abdul Fatawu against Southampton:

The graphic below highlights that Dewsbury-Hall did the bulk of his chance creation in these central areas just outside the opposition penalty box:

At other times, Dewsbury-Hall was the one stretching the game for Leicester, leveraging his speed to run in behind while Maresca’s nominal No 9 dropped deep to link play and draw out opposition centre-backs. The sequence below shows Swansea City being carved open by a sharp vertical passing move that ends with Dewsbury-Hall racing through to score:

Against deeper-lying defences, Dewsbury-Hall was encouraged by Maresca to crash the penalty area from midfield, particularly when Leicester worked the ball into crossing positions. Here, against Coventry City, he manages to connect with an inviting delivery from the right-sided No 8, Dennis Praet, and guide a header inside the far post:

The graphic below illustrates that almost all of Dewsbury-Hall’s goals from open play were scored from similar spots in the left half of the penalty area, usually as the result of well-timed runs from his advanced-midfield starting position:

 

Maresca kept Dewsbury-Hall high up the pitch when Leicester did not have the ball, often shifting into more of a 4-4-2 shape with his left-sided No 8 pushed up alongside his striker to lead the first line of pressure.

The sequence below shows it working to great effect against Cardiff City, with Dewsbury-Hall’s initial press prompting two ill-advised opposition passes infield, yielding a costly turnover just outside their penalty area and a shooting chance, which he converts:

As with his attacking role in Maresca’s system, Dewsbury-Hall’s defensive contribution was overwhelmingly focused on the left half of the pitch:

 

All of the above makes it clear that Dewsbury-Hall will not be competing for minutes with Moises Caicedo, who will be the starting No 6 in Maresca’s system. The same goes for any of the other candidates to play at the base of midfield — namely Romeo Lavia, Andrey Santos and Lesley Ugochukwu.

Maresca wants Dewsbury-Hall for that left-sided No 8 role, which puts him into competition with Chelsea’s array of more progressive midfielders.

Enzo Fernandez is an interesting case, not least because his sphere of passing influence has tended to skew towards the left half of the pitch in his Stamford Bridge career to date. That will have to change if Dewsbury-Hall becomes the preferred option on the left of Chelsea’s three-man midfield. Fernandez faces a bigger adaptation to thrive as a No 8 in Maresca’s system, since operating ahead of the ball rarely seemed to maximise his passing excellence under Mauricio Pochettino last season and frequently left him unable to help the team’s transition defence.

GO DEEPER

Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall to Chelsea: The Athletic 500 transfer ratings

Maresca often selected Wilfred Ndidi, traditionally a midfield destroyer, as his right-sided No 8 to add teeth to Leicester’s press. To meet the physical demands of that role in and out of possession, Fernandez will need to show he has fully recovered from the hernia which limited him for much of 2023-24 and is back in peak condition.

There are no such concerns about Conor Gallagher, who could provide much the same energy, tenacity and all-round contribution as Ndidi, while building on his improved scoring form in the final stretch of last season. But there are approximately 106 million reasons to be confident that, unless his form completely falls off a cliff, Fernandez will be in the first-choice midfield.

Chelsea view Gallagher as more defensive and box-to-box than Dewsbury-Hall, and have not ruled out giving a contract extension to the academy graduate, whose current deal expires next summer.

Yet despite their differences, there is enough overlap between the two to conclude that this signing makes selling Gallagher more palatable.

Dewsbury-Hall’s aptitude for leading Maresca’s press from the front offsets the potential loss of Gallagher’s greatest on-field attribute. He is also a rare match in terms of durability, having incredibly only missed one game due to injury in a Leicester career that goes back to his debut in January 2020. Then there is the financial element; coming from the Championship, Dewsbury-Hall is almost certainly earning a lot less than what it would take to renew Gallagher after a career-best season.

It would be difficult for Chelsea to get less out of Lavia this season than they did in an injury-wrecked 2023-24, and the Belgian’s technical profile makes him a potential option for the right-sided No 8 role, as well as an alternative to Caicedo in a deeper position.

---

Dewsbury-Hall will fancy his chances of holding down a starting position as Chelsea’s most advanced midfielder in 2023-24, particularly given the inexperience of the other obvious first-team options available.

Carney Chukwuemeka and Cesare Casadei have four Premier League starts for Chelsea combined, while recent £19million signing Omari Kellyman has even less professional seasoning. Casadei did not even play in front of Dewsbury-Hall at Leicester while on loan there last season.

Chukwuemeka would likely have featured far more for Pochettino’s Chelsea were it not for a freak knee injury suffered against West Ham last August, though still managed to score two of the club’s best goals of the season either side of that setback.

He has the talent to make a real impact at Stamford Bridge in 2024-25, underscoring Chelsea’s reluctance to allow him to leave on loan. But the biggest threat to Dewsbury-Hall’s place in Maresca’s starting XI might come from a slightly unexpected source: the club’s reigning player of the season, Cole Palmer.

While most often deployed on the right by Pochettino, Palmer spent large swathes of his breakout 2023-24 campaign drifting into the No 10 position to function as the brain of a dynamic attack. He has all of the required attributes to function as Maresca’s left-sided No 8 in and out of possession, and this may well have been Chelsea’s Plan A if they had succeeded in signing Michael Olise from Crystal Palace.

Maresca could still go to a similar alignment with Noni Madueke on the right flank, but the history of coaches rekindling their working relationships with key players from their previous clubs heavily indicates that Dewsbury-Hall will be a regular starter for Chelsea — particularly in the early weeks and months, as the Italian works to make his system second nature to his players.

[Tomo 21,751]

It's ironic because for years there was moaning we were waiting until Brighton, Benfica etc al were charging premiums for players until we tried to get them but now we're trying to get ahead of the game ourselves that's now a bad thing.

[robsblubot 3,595]

30 minutes ago, Tomo said:

It's ironic because for years there was moaning we were waiting until Brighton, Benfica etc al were charging premiums for players until we tried to get them but now we're trying to get ahead of the game ourselves that's now a bad thing.

A few smart bets was never a bad thing. Signing good academy players was never a bad thing.

Where do players who just aren't good enough just yet play tho? Will they get minutes to develop proper? will we have to suffer while they learn the ropes? It has been historically difficult to give minutes to developing players and there is a reason for that--that's the advantage of smaller teams.