Chelsea’s transfer strategy at the moment has been criticised from all angles, and now we’ve even got someone who has been on the inside criticising it.
Alessandro Pizzoli worked at the club as a scout between 2019 and 2022, and says that one of the players he suggested to the club in that time was Cesare Casadei.
“I proposed Casadei when I first arrived at Chelsea, he was playing at Under-17 level and cost €180,000. He was not considered good enough and turned down, but then when he cost €20m, that’s when they bought him,” Pizzoli explained in quotes picked up by Football Italia.
“That’s how it works there, they have a different mentality.”
Along with our strategy of letting Brighton sign great South American talents and then buying them for 20 times the price later on, this is what’s wrong with our current setup. All this wasted money has to come from somewhere and at the moment it looks like it’s going to come from selling off our own academy talents.
A little more forward thinking would make us a lot more competitive on the pitch, and a lot more profitable off it. Hopefully as this ownership matures we will see more and more of that, and hear fewer horror stories like the one above.