Nizaar Kinsella has this morning confirmed that Chelsea have “agreed a fee” for the in demand Genk goalkeeper Mike Penders
According to earlier reports, Genk are asking around €20m for him, and Chelsea seem willing to pay something along those lines. The move was first hinted at a few weeks ago and then went quiet, but it seems that progress has been made on it in the background.
Penders is going to stay on loan at Genk – a sensible decision for his development, given he’s just broken into the team there. But this means another one of our precious foreign loan slots taken up. The options for those players remaining really are dwindling fast.
https://twitter.com/NizaarKinsella/status/1821850344197931232
An insane stockpile of talent
Kinsella’s Tweet claims that Chelsea’s goalkeeping department “have wanted another teenage talent on the books since the beginning of the window.”
That doesn’t say much for Eddie Beach (who has just secured a loan move away), or Lucas Bergstrom, or Gabriel Slonina (signed just two years ago as a teenager, yet to play a minute for us). And Fillip Jorgensen is only 22, hardly a veteran. He was signed just last week, for €24.5m. A year ago we also signed two goalkeepers, for similar fees.
We were confused by how Chelsea would deal with the log jam in this area of the pitch at the start of the summer – and so far their response has been spending more than €40m on two new keepers without managing to secure a sale for any of the 5 options they already had.
Add together the money we paid for Robert Sanchez, Djordje Petrovic, Slonina, Jorgensen and Penders and you’d have enough to buy any world class keeper you like, plus their combined wages will be significant too. We wish we could say we understood the plan.
