As of yesterday afternoon, the hottest deal around Chelsea is the potential arrival of one of our new manager’s old favourites.
Kiernan Dewsbury Hall was a key piece of Enzo Maresca’s Leicester team which won the Championship last season, and now the rumours are that the Italian coach wants to bring the midfielder with him to Stamford Bridge.
🚨🔵 Chelsea approached Leicester City for Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall with plan to include players in their formal proposal.
Understand Datro Fofana and Cesare Casadei are among players being discussed.
Dewsbury-Hall, waiting for Chelsea; swap deal/move to Brighton has collapsed. pic.twitter.com/Zfa7wXXHDB
— Fabrizio Romano (@FabrizioRomano) June 28, 2024
Today, Fabrizio Romano has added further detail to the story. He claimed that the deal developing between Leicester and Brighton is “set to collapse” after Chelsea’s interest became clear.
It’s also noted that Chelsea, for their part, “want to include players in the deal,” something we hear almost every time a purchase is suggested at the moment. We’re not yet sure who that would be exactly, but there are no shortage of fringe players accumulated in the last couple of years who we can imagine the Blues would happily shuffle along without realising a loss.
Romano has suggested that David Fofana and Cesare Casadei would be prime targets, which makes sense to us given they don’t have a natural place in our squad next season anyway.
A puzzling move all round
As we pointed out yesterday, this is a move which makes no sense to us from a squad building point of view. We have a plethora of midfielders of all different varieties, almost all of them bought in the last two years.
Spending another chunk of money and wages on another one just seems crazy – KDH is a good player but is hardly going to rocket us to the Champions League. His two most recent seasons saw him relegated and then playing in the Championship. Perhaps it’s a very specific Maresca request? Or perhaps there’s more FFP stuff going on behind the scenes… it’s all very confusing, in any case.
