With 4 games played, we’ve already reached that point in the season where premature judgments are being made on Chelsea’s summer signings.
Because the attacking showing we’ve seen haven’t really been up to scratch, the players brought in are being harshly judged, those we didn’t buy are being seen as the ones that got away – case in point, Fermin Lopez banging in two for Barcelona last night.
€70m offer wasn’t enough to tempt Juventus to sell key man
Fermin wasn’t the only Chelsea target looking good over the weekend. Kenan Yildiz continued his great progress at Juventus with a superb goal in their thrilling win over title rivals Inter in Serie A. That prompted a little retrospective from TuttoSport about how easily the Turkish wonderkid could have ended up elsewhere this summer.
Chelsea apparently tabled a €70m bid for the attacking midfield, but Juventus rejected it on the grounds that the 20 year old is “practically unsellable.”
The Blues, unable to sign Yildiz or Xavi Simons, despite long standing interest, ended the window by bringing in the less exciting pair of Facundo Buonanotte and Alejandro Garnacho to add some depth in attacking areas. They joined Jamie Gittens, who had come into the squad earlier in the summer.
Chelsea may have missed the boat on rising star
If Yildiz keeps performing like this, you can be sure that Chelsea will keep him on their list.
But given his valuation is always rising, and could go beyond €100m very quickly if he keeps playing well, Chelsea may have missed their chance. They have made the occasional exception for a €100m player, but it’s not common, and we get the feeling Yildiz is going to end up as one of the very painful “ones that got away.”
How did we have 70m to offer for Yildiz, but NOT for Simons??? There’s a real inconsistency to this story in terms of what the directors were thinking. If this Yildiz reporting is to be trusted then, together with the stories of the Simons and Kudus pursuits, they were, at least early in the transfer window, seeking a quality player to provide depth behind Palmer. But nowhere has it been explained in any satisfying manner how we went from pursuing three world class options to winding up with Buonanotte on loan? The circumstantial evidence suggests that they got too enamored with Garnacho on a cut-rate price and that left them with too small a war chest to get a quality #10.
Alas, the Brentford match was a perfect microcosm of how their priorities could seriously hamstring our season. We looked toothless in attack without the Cole Palmer, so we’re a one re-aggravation of his groin away from struggling to overcome mid-table competitors. Meanwhile, it took all of 15 minutes to see exactly what we already knew about Garnacho, namely, he looks a world class threat going forward, but lacks the awareness/focus/commitment to do the other things—LIKE MARK HIS MAN ON A SET PIECE. He quite literally cost us two points when he failed to even lay eyes (much less a body) on his man.
Somebody needs to keep digging for the story here. Despite all of the other successful business in this most recent transfer window (particularly the outgoings),there are serious questions that need to be asked and answered about what the directors were (and are) thinking about there being an understudy to Cole Palmer.