Chelsea Transfers

[Stats 7,065]

6 hours ago, JFKvsNixon said:

David Fofana was injured just before xmas, and is expected to be out for the rest of the season; it's why he was recalled.

Oh sorry, I got confused. I thought you were saying we recalled Fofana due to Guiu being injured. Thanks for clarifying. I had no idea.

[OneMoSalah 8,810]

Another young midfielder to go with the other 500 young midfielders we have.

And not an attacking player or permament departure for the likes of Nkunku and Felix (loan is disappointing) who Maresca clearly doesn’t rate/trust.

Few other guys out like Veiga, Chilwell, Disasi but if Cucurella gets injured who plays as LB? Big big gamble.

[YorkshireBlue 3,149]

3 minutes ago, OneMoSalah said:

Another young midfielder to go with the other 500 young midfielders we have.

And not an attacking player or permament departure for the likes of Nkunku and Felix (loan is disappointing) who Maresca clearly doesn’t rate/trust.

Few other guys out like Veiga, Chilwell, Disasi but if Cucurella gets injured who plays as LB? Big big gamble.

Think u mean when James gets injured and gusto is at RB who plays LB 🫣

Edited 8 hours ago by YorkshireBlue

[Mhsc 945]

2 minutes ago, YorkshireBlue said:

Think u mean when James gets injured and gusto is at RB who plays LB 🫣

IF Lavia is fit then probably we'd see Caicedo fullback inverting into midfield again

Otherwise we'll just see the painful meme of a CB playing out there like Disasi was for us - Colwill could always move to LB again and probably be much less of a liability out there (but also much less useful in possession)

[YorkshireBlue 3,149]

33 minutes ago, Mhsc said:

IF Lavia is fit then probably we'd see Caicedo fullback inverting into midfield again

Otherwise we'll just see the painful meme of a CB playing out there like Disasi was for us - Colwill could always move to LB again and probably be much less of a liability out there (but also much less useful in possession)

After last night he wasn’t very useful in possession either 

[Thor 2,474]

We actually signed Essugo? 
 

Awesome if so. Looks like an absolute bull but with skill to match. 

[mkh 366]

There is an idea discussed internally at Chelsea to give Kendry Paez a spell at Strasbourg, although sources close to the player and club insist no final decision has been made.

~ @NizaarKinsella

[mkh 366]

Malo Gusto has changed his agent and is now represented by Wasserman agency. (@sebnonda)

Why ? 🤔

[Chelsea65 2]

Essugo, has he definitely been signed?  Appreciate the confirmation if anyone knows 

[YorkshireBlue 3,149]

49 minutes ago, Chelsea65 said:

Essugo, has he definitely been signed?  Appreciate the confirmation if anyone knows 

Don’t think so, nothing online I can find to say we have 

[mkh 366]

✅️ Chelsea have already completed a few deals in the background which have not yet been officially confirmed but are considered by reputable sources to be internally confirmed.

following players:

- Mamadou Sarr (in Summer 2025)

- Mathis Ebouế (Has already arrived in January 2025)

- Dastan Satpaev (in Summer 2026)

- Dário Essugo (in Summer 2025)

- Denner (in Summer 2026)

 

Players officially joining Chelsea in 2025:

- Mike Penders (in Summer 2025)🔵

- Kendry Paez (in Summer 2025)🔵

- Estêvẫo (in Summer 2025)🔵

- Anselmino (Has already returned in January 2025.)🔵

- Mathis Amougou (Has already arrived in January 2025.)🔵

[Vesper 29,226]

23 hours ago, DDA said:

So, did we sign Essugo or not? For me, he looks the more promising player between him and Amougou.

Another wonderkid for Chelsea?! Blues considering summer swoop to sign €20m-rated Sporting CP midfielder Dario Essugo

Chelsea are eyeing a move for Sporting CP wonderkid Dario Essugo in the summer transfer window.

Feb 04, 2025 22:58+01:00

https://www.goal.com/en/lists/another-wonderkid-for-Chelsea-considering-summer-swoop-to-sign-sporting-cp-midfielder-dario-essugo/blt50e22423592c6b3c

[Vesper 29,226]

The Osimhen Test

https://www.scoutednotebook.com/i/156402230/the-osimhen-test

Victor Osimhen is a caricature centre-forward. On MD8 of the UEFA Europa League, he almost generated as many Expected Goals (1.48) as passes completed (2). He attempted nine shots from 21 total touches.

Across the entire UEL League Phase, he averaged a shot every 3.8 touches and almost had as many shots (41) as successful passes (53). This is the pinnacle of a goal-hanging poacher. This is the next centre-forward profile I want to explore.

To do so, I decided to find out the following: during his time at Napoli, was Victor Osimhen the premium poacher in Europe’s Big Five Leagues? The hope was that I would stumble across some next generation goal-hangers along the way. Here is the Osimhen Test in Scatter Plot form, with a few high-profile names highlighted.

 

If at any point you would like to ignore me and query the tables, it should be available here. If you would like to explore the Scatter Plot, click here.

For those venturing on, I am going to work through my methodology, explaining my thought process while highlighting some outliers and anomalies. Spoiler alert: one of them is the €77m man, Jhon Durán.

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To begin answering my question, I exported Stathead FBref data for every forward to score at least five non-penalty goals from 2020/21 to 2023/24. This produced 703 players.

182 of those players were aged 23 or under during the final season contributing to their data. That sounds convoluted but it’s the best way to explain it. For example, Martin Ødegaard appears as an U23 player because he was tagged as a forward by FBref for a handful of games during the 2021/22 season, therefore appearing in the export. If anyone has any suggestions on how to refine position further, let me know.

I then calculated my two top-tier poacher metrics you can see in the Scatter Plot: Touches per Shot and Penalty Box Proximity. It’s very nice to see Osimhen rank second for both. After all, this test is named after him.

For Touches per Shot, Rodrigo Muniz is a fun surprise at number one and he’s good for the brand considering he was born in 2001. The fact his Average Shot Distance is the third-closest to goal within this group of 15 is another good sign; Mauro Icardi, who leads this group for that metric, stands tall in a land of giants to rank third overall for this metric.

The appearance of Loïs Openda, Darwin Núñez and Erling Haaland also shows that Power Forwards can exhibit Poacher traits: purposeful, pacy off-ball runners rarely have lots of touches. It would be interesting to see how Osimhen and Muniz stack up in the Power Forward profile (I have a SkillCorner article in the works, watch this space).

Returning to Penalty Box Proximity, another big-body centre-forward takes top spot:

Like Muniz, there is a much smaller sample of data for Artem Dovbyk when compared to Osimhen, but the fact nearly a third of the Ukrainian’s touches occurred inside the penalty area is a testament to Girona’s style of play and the Ukrainian’s ability to operate and make an impact in that area.

After posting about these metrics following last week’s MNS, the very smart Scott Willis (Cannon Stats) made a very smart suggestion: what about applying the calculations to final third actions only? Although it produced a similar ranking, there were enough subtle changes to suggest we can use the Final Third derivatives to laser in on the centre-forwards that set up a tent in the penalty area.

 

For instance, it helps provide a fairer representation of style for strikers in teams that demand a lot of work battling for duels in the middle third. Take Luuk de Jong. He ranks in the 74th percentile when looking at his percentage of total touches that come inside the area (Penalty Box Proximity). However, he ranks in the 94th percentile when focussing on the percentage of his final third touches that occur in the penalty area.

This suggests he does a lot of work to help his team get into final third but once that territory is secured, he pitches up his tent in the box - his top five ranking for Average Shot Distance we saw earlier backs this up. My theory is that there is less of a gap between both metrics when looking at his output for PSV given their recent dominance of the Eredivisie.

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The nugget of (potential) insight to introduce after looking at that first batch of data is that when looking at the correlation between NPxG and the others in this table, the strongest positive correlation was, excluding Non-Penalty Goals, was provided by Penalty Box Proximity (0.76), ahead of its Final Third variant (0.74) and Shots (0.7). Non-penalty Conversion Rate (0.13) and Touches in the Penalty Area had the weakest correlation in the set (0.24).

Conversion Rate is the biggest purple patch metric I have come across in my eight years of working with this kind of data. Darwin Núñez and Nicolas Jackson both hit 30% before their respective moves to Liverpool and Chelsea. Now they share a reputation as two of the poorest finishers in the Premier League.

I believe it makes little sense to focus on Conversion Rate on its own. There could be value in measuring it for particular game states or periods of the match to help profile the clutch poachers, while extreme values would also be worth investigating. But it is more often than not a vanity metric to highlight form and generate buzz for a signing - trust me, I used to help generate that buzz. If I told you that Chris Wood’s Non-Penalty Conversion Rate within this dataset is 13.8%, would that change your perception of him? It shouldn’t.

Eyes of Arsenal fans reading (and writing, guilty) may have been drawn to Benjamin Šeško in the table above. I imagine the recruitment team’s job is to try to work out if there is a particular skill or collection of other metrics that suggests he could maintain that 29.8%, rather than pushing the club to sign him because of it. Trust this process.

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As for the lack of relationship between Touches in the Attacking Penalty Area and NPxG is likely due to the fact wingers and wide-forwards usually dominate the former.

Not only do the likes of Kylian Mbappé and Mohamed Salah rain down shots from inside the area, their take-ons completed and passes inside the box all contribute to the tally. There is a reason we described Victor Boniface as the ‘nine with a winger’s soul’. Also note that Darwin Núñez appears in another Top 15, while Alejandro Garnacho is the closest to Mbappé for this metric. Keep the faith, United fans.

 

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As I have stressed before, I am still an aspiring data journalist [says who? - ed] and far from a data scientist - I have not studied maths beyond GCSE level. You may think ‘spending most of your time in the box will lead to good chances’ is so obvious it’s not even worth saying. But I’ve said it. I am completely ready for someone to tell me that I have used correlations and the like incorrectly.

Even then, I still think looking at Penalty Box Proximity at least alongside Touches in the Attacking Penalty Area and other traditional metrics can help identify the ‘out-and-out centre-forwards’ everyone cries out for. When people say ‘out-and-out centre-forward’ they mean Victor Osimhen. Do they also mean Jhon Durán?

The Colombian is an anomaly for numerous reasons, but let’s deal with his shot make-up for now. Despite ranking 7th for Final Third Touches per Shot, he has the lowest Penalty Box Proximity in this group. This fits the eye-test perception of his maverick playing style, further compounded by his Average Shot Distance of 17.1 yards. Does any of this matter when he’s scoring 0.74 NPG per 90? We don’t know, but it’s worth the risk to find out.

Durán’s data paints the picture of a shoot on sight, pot-shotter. Now, he’s playing alongside another one up front.

While players like Jhon Durán are undeniably box-office, Victor Osimhen is renting an office in the box. Goal-hanging is a craft and the Nigerian has mastered it. Now you know how to discover his apprentice.