Christian Pulisic has left Chelsea and joined AC Milan on a permanent transfer, the club has announced on their official website.
The move has been in the works for a while, but only since the Italian side sold Sandro Tonali has it felt like they’ve had the financial muscle to get it over the line.
The 24 year old leaves Chelsea as one of a host of players who have not lived up to their billing during a chaotic period at the club. We were often frustrated by him, but there’s no denying he has some exceptional abilities, if one can harness them.
However he can claim to have his fingerprints all over our 2021 Champions League win – both in qualifying us for the tournament and in helping us win it.
Call it hindsight if you want, but this transfer never felt like one that was going to work – even from before it happened. It was agreed late in January, and Dortmund simply stopped using the winger after that point.
The fact they thought their team wouldn’t suffer without his presence was a red flag, and in his time at Chelsea, despite showing flashes of talent, he was unable to establish himself as indispensable once again.
We hope that a spell in Milan, in a new league with new challenges, will be good for him, and that a fresh start will allow him to reach his potential better than he would have been able to at Chelsea.
No “news” here. Just SuperFrank stirring the pot again with another dubious headline.
Honestly, the biggest “waste” here was the club spending so much on Pulisic and then a series of managers leaving him on the bench time and time again. After completing his signing with Milan he was even quoted as saying he wished he had been given more “opportunity” at Chelsea, so it’s not just his American fan base who watched his treatment and that of Werner, Havertz, Mount, et al. and saw a double standard where guys from traditional footballing nations got opportunities to play through poor form that simply weren’t afforded to Pulisic—the American. When he struggled it’s as if the manager and supporters simply took this as confirmation of their bias (implicit or explicit) that, of course, “Americans can’t play football.” Whereas the assumption with guys like Werner and Havertz when they struggled was that they just needed another game (or five!) to find their form. Alas, this confirmation bias not only hurt the player but ultimately undermined his resale value (to say nothing of robbing Chelsea of more performances like the ones who showed during Project Restart and the World Cup).