Chelsea have a lot of work to do on the transfer front, and that includes selling players as well as buying.
One player they’ll try and shift this summer is Kepa Arrizabalaga, who spent last year on loan with Real Madrid filling in for Thibaut Courtois – but ended the season as third choice with the Belgian back from injury and Andriy Lunin getting ahead of him in the pecking order.
Understandably, he’s not keen to come back to London just to sit on the bench as he was doing in Spain.
“He is expected to hold talks with the manager but he has one year left on his deal and doesn’t want to spend it just being on the bench in London,” a source is quoted as saying by Caughtoffside.
“The entire case with Madrid is not closed but it all depends on what Chelsea want to do and of course how the talks with the new manager go because normally in football when there is a new boss everyone gets a fresh start.”
An annual issue
There are so many other things going on at Chelsea that the situation with Kepa has naturally fallen down the list of priorities. The Romelu Lukaku situation is similar, but attracts a lot more attention simply because he’s likely to fetch a bigger fee when he does go.
The situation with the Spaniard has been clear for some time now – as with Lukaku, we will look to loan him out continually until his value has fallen enough that the offers we get for them match the remaining value on their contract, or until that contract expires. In Kepa’s case, teams don’t want to pay much for him, so unless a team rather surprisingly swoops in to save the day again, it looks like another loan for him – with a return to Madrid feeling like a pretty distant possibility at the moment. Then next summer, he’s free to do that he likes.
