Chelsea are underway against Servette in the Conference League in Switzerland, but there is bad news back home at Cobham.
After a week or more hanging in the balance, the Armando Broja move to Ipswich is officially dead. Fabrizio Romano has called it “100% off and collapsed.”
That’s what we were hearing a week ago, but it really lingered for a while. We now at least have a little better understanding of what’s going on. The word was that it was a failed medical, and we feared it was to do with the knee injury that kept the striker out for so long after he suffered it at the tail end of 2022.
It may well be a legacy of that, but it’s actually an Achilles issue, at last according to Kieran Gill of the Daily Mail. The setup this season was going to be a loan with a £30m clause to buy the Albania forward if they stayed up. But it appears this latest issue is serious enough that Kieran McKenna’s team are not willing to take a risk even on that.
What’s next for unfortunate striker
Poor Broja will now return to Cobham to rehab with his dreams of a move away crushed. He will likely now spend a miserable few months training with the exiles in the “bomb squad,” through no fault of his own, before trying to find another move away in January.
Whatever this issue is – and we don’t really have a read on how bad it is – it’s come at the worst possible time for Broja, whose prospects are really crumbling since their peak after good loan spells at Vitesse and then Southampton.
He’s still just 22, and there’s a long way to go, but these issues are really stacking up for the academy product.