Lewis Hall has left Chelsea for Newcastle on loan, the club have confirmed on their official website.
It’s one of the most controversial transfers in recent times at Chelsea. The youngster is a home grown academy star, and in the last two seasons made some brilliant cameos when given the chance. However his path to the first team was consistently blocked by conservative managers and some foolish transfer decisions.
In preseason he barely got a minute, with last season’s flop Marc Cucurella preferred simply because he has a bigger transfer fee attached.
Hall is a “pure profit” sale because he’s an academy product and thus cost us nothing in fees.
And so Newcastle get one of our best academy players for a knockdown price (the option in the loan is said to be around £35m), all because we’ve dug ourselves into a financial hole wasting money on average players at huge cost.
No wonder so many fans are frustrated
Hey, you wanna talk about short-sighted… Look at the performance Christian Pulisic had for AC Milan over the weekend, lol! Maybe it just goes to show what a difference it makes when you feel wanted!
There’s all this loyalty expressed for someone like Hall (because he’s “one of ours?”), but my observation has been that the British fan-base tends to overrate the youth with whom they’re familiar and underrate outsiders. Pulisic is a perfect example. He was never really trusted and embraced by supporters the way a guy like Mount (who has looked truly underwhelming since the World Cup), or Gallagher (who is full of costly mistakes like losing his mark on Sunday), or, now, Hall (who, let’s be honest, is still largely unproven). Supporters whine and moan anytime there’s even a whiff of one of these guys being sold, and then want to cherry pick an example of the player we bought who didn’t work out as reason the academy lad shouldn’t have been sold. It all betrays a pretty significant bias that has little to do with on-field performance.