We’re racing through the season towards the summer transfer window now, and already the sources are talking excitedly about our plans. Before any purchases are made we need to make sales, and insider Fabrizio Romano has already got 4 players on his list of certain departures from Chelsea.
This builds on his reporting on a few of these deals in the last few days. With the Premier League’s accounting deadline coming up on the 30th June, the priority is clearly to get as many of these deals arranged in the next couple of weeks so that it becomes very clear just how many of the players we actually might want to keep will have to be sold.
“As previously reported, the plan is for Armando Broja to be sold once he comes back from his loan at Fulham, and Hakim Ziyech can already be considered to have played his last game for Chelsea,” the insider wrote in an exclusive picked up by Caught Offside.
“I also expect Romelu Lukaku and Ian Maatsen to leave Chelsea, but for the others we have to wait and see what happens.”
First 4 out the door
None of these really surprise us, in fact most of these you could have predicted last summer. The Lukaku saga is just a rolling disaster which it looks we will finally be able to get out of (at a huge loss) this summer, while Hakim Ziyech’s story is basically just fizzling out to nothing, with Galatasaray already having agreed to effectively buy out the rest of his contract with us.
Maatsen and Broja feel like they could have turned things around with us this season, but neither was really given a chance, and as home grown players the profit from their sale is clearly too good for the sporting directors to turn down.