Matt Law has just published a piece on the Daily Telegraph where he looks at the sales Chelsea are making this summer and claims we’re going to be up £100m by the end of this week.
That will mainly come from the £60m or so we get for Kai Havertz from Arsenal, plus the £25m or so from Man City for Mateo Kovacic. But those figures have been discussed extensively already. What we’re interested in is the numbers around Hakim Ziyech and Kalidou Koulibaly, who are going to Saudi Arabia.
We haven’t heard much about the actual fees involved there yet, and here Law cites them as £8m for Ziyech and £17m for Koulibaly. It’s not a lot, which shows how little interest there was in the pair. But most importantly it gets their wages off the books. Otherwise we would have been loaning them out this season, ready to come back and deal with this same problem all over again in a year’s time.
While the cash we get for their transfer is minimal, it’s still a decent chunk for the pair and gets them off our books immediately so we can start planning ahead. It certainly doesn’t bode well for a big fee for any of the other players we’re looking to shift over there – but again, getting big money for Edouard Mendy or whoever was just never going to happen.
