Fabrizio Romano is today reporting that Brighton will make another formal offer for Levi Colwill this week.
Following their embarrassingly lowball £30m offer of a couple of weeks ago, they will now submit an embarrassingly lowball £40m offer. That won’t change anything, and Chelsea will turn that down too.
Brighton know that’s not going to be enough to get a deal done, so why are they doing it? It’s a tough one to answer. Perhaps they are trying to show their fans that they are doing all they can to sign the player who shone on loan with them last season.
Perhaps, more worryingly, they’re getting encouragement from the player to push to sign him, if he particularly wants to stay put on the South Coast playing with Roberto de Zerbi in the Europa League next season.
We don’t know. What we DO know is that it would take more like £70m or £80m to convince Chelsea to sell one of Europe’s top young central defenders – and even at that price most fans would have no interest in seeing a deal done.
There were certainly some uncomfortable hints about Colwill pushing for a move as the season came to an end, but it looks looks more likely than ever that he’s accepted he’s got a brilliant future back at the club which trained him, and meeting his new manager in preseason is only going to help with that.