24 Jun 2024 12:28:25
Very disappointed with this weekends transfer developments, particularly with the Olise news.
I'm sure the truth lies somewhere in between the various media reports, but to not be able to compromise and close this deal, having attempted to do so last summer as well, is extremely frustrating. The kid meets all the criteria we have been told the new regime is looking for while also would have improved the team right now. It doesn't even seem like Bayern have offered that much? By bringing him in we could have begun the process of selling off the likes of Angelo/ Madueke/ Moreira/ Hutchinson putting us in a great position moving forwards with Willian joining next season. Now we have to hope and pray that Madueke, presumably, will take a big step forwards and score more than 5 times next season. I find it especially baffling that the press was routinely briefed about how Olise was our number 1 target, only for it to collapse at seemingly the last hurdle. If it truly is just down to the financials I guess this is a case of our chickens coming home to roost.
Then to top it off, instead of signing Duran from Villa we end up spending £18m on an unheard of academy AM who was brought by Villa for less than 1m 12 months ago. I wish the lad all the best but I don't know how this signing can be explained. I hope everyone on here who was frothing at the mouth at the idea of signing Duran are equally livid at this. Where does this leave McNeilly, Richards, Stutter, Washington, Morgan, Castledine + others in the academy ad nauseum? You can argue every one of these are better than what Kellyman has shown so far.
To go from being strongly linked with Osimhen and Olise, players that would immediately vault us into the mix at the top of the table, to signing another teenager for an inflated fee is such a let down. As for Jonathan David, good player, but I wouldn't say he is any better than Jackson and doesn't offer anything that Jackson currently lacks. A strange signing but I guess we've been linked with him for about 3 years so not entirely unsurprising.
Maresca is going to have to live up to all the PR briefings if we go into next season with largely the same group of attackers.
24 Jun 2024 13:38:50
I haven’t got a clue why the Olise deal isn’t happening and I also have no idea what other clubs are offering Palace or the player. I just assume that the overall demands of the transfer are above our valuation.
Osimhen was my first choice but let’s be honest he didn’t have a brilliant season at Napoli and he was average in the AFCON. Another player near the top of my list was Sesko but he signed a new contract.
Our new manager has a tough gig but he has a talented bunch of players to work with and i will be very disappointed if further progress isn’t forthcoming.
24 Jun 2024 15:24:34
The fact that Ed001 hasn't even seen the lad play and we're spending £20 million pounds on him smacks of dodgy business to me, RBD. These aren't football decisions. They can't be. The club have just rejected a deal for Olise as not representing 'value for money'. As you've said, that's a player who immediately makes our first team better.
What could possibly be the rationale behind dropping a third of the Olise transfer fee on a player no one has ever heard of? Why are we helping Villa out of their financial hole? Spread this £20 million over 5 years or so (£4 million per year), and hope to sell him for £30ish million in two or three years, make a small profit and balance the books for some of the previous transfer mistakes? As you say, where does this kind of deal leave the current academy and dev squad kids? Where did the deals for Ugochukwu, Lavia, Caicedo leave Santos and Casadei (two excellent players, from what I've seen of them)? The club is being run by a bunch of arrogant idiots.
24 Jun 2024 16:08:00
I'm amazed people think signing big names is suddenly going to have such a positive impact. Every big name we've signed since 2015 - with the exception of Kante - has been a massive disappointment.
Also curious how you've wrote off 3 wingers - all of whom have played less than 90 minutes for our senior team - and also one winger who was starting to show real promise in favour of a player who whilst definitely good spent a large portion of the year injured.
Finally, on Kellyman - he's an attacking midfielder who can play off the left. Stutter isn't. Nor Richards, nor Washington. Nor JJ Morgan. Castledine is an attacking midfielder so you got one right. Your entire paragraph about him is just writing the kid off before he even kicks a ball for us - pretty certain the £19m is the final maximum fee and will be heavily driven by add-ons and targets to met.
24 Jun 2024 16:47:04
Well, the club briefed that Hutchinson was available for sale for £30m earlier this month - I'd keep him given the circumstances, Angelo managed 0 goals and assists all season while on loan, Moreira was so poor that he was sent home from his loan and Madueke stunk the place out all season to the tune of 8 goals and 3 assists in 1500 mins.
Olise managed 10 goals and 6 assists despite spending a large portion of the year injured. I'd suggest that he is an upgrade on all of them.
As for Kellyman, great he could turn out to be the next best thing since sliced bread. But he isn't going to be that now which when we require the most help. I'm not criticising him, I'm criticising the decision to spend a frankly ludicrous amount of money on him given the available options in house. I notice you ignore McNeilly who has played up front, as a 10 and off either flank this season and at the very least we have seen Richards and Washington playing on the wings last season. If you want a true like for like comparison, Tyrique George is a LW who got 14 goals and 10 assists.
24 Jun 2024 17:34:21
Why is this signing “dodgy business? ” I have seen no evidence of the club being run by a bunch of “arrogant idiots. ”
RBD, I do have concerns about Chelsea players coming through the academy and seeing us sign young players from all over the world but it’s now a global game with global competition with scouts looking high and low for talent.
I am not ignoring our young academy talent but history dictates that only a small amount of players actually make it into the first team. If we look back at our previous owners without rose tinted glasses, they sold several youngsters for what now looks like bargain prices and we also lost a few when there were contractually free.
Palace got a top class defender from us who had limited experience for what now looks like a bargain price.
I also can’t remember Olise at our academy and I certainly can’t remember the circumstances surrounding him leaving but maybe the previous owners could have done more to keep him or more likely he was a late ish developer.
{Ed001's Note - isn't the reason you get so few making it into the first team because you keep buying young foreign players? From what I have seen, very few, if any, are better than the ones that you have sold from the academy. It seems bad business to me and why Chelsea have ended up mired in midtable despite spending over a billion.}
24 Jun 2024 18:52:21
Dodgy business Tom, because it smacks of something else going on – £20 million is an insane amount of money for a player who made 6 first team appearances in the top flight. I can't fathom it. I hope the lad goes on to become a legend for us etc etc, but honestly. Arrogant idiots because they have shown themselves to be arrogant in their interviews, decision-making, what they assumed they could achieve in the short-term, and thus far they haven't done a single thing to prove they're not idiots apart from buying Cole Palmer. You may disagree, but we've been through five managers in two years and spent a billion pounds to sit mid-table with about a hundred young players on the books who probably won't ever see consistent first-team action. They identified things the Abramovich regime did badly when they came in (they literally namechecked some of these elements: overspending on players, too many young players on loan without getting to the first team, bad pathway between academy and first team squad) and have outdone themselves to spend more money, buy more unproven young players, effectively killing the link between the academy and the first team. We're now in a position where we look like a joke – we've struggled to convince top-tier players to come to us this summer (the euphemistic 'selling the project' line), and top-level managers, when and if they become available, would surely be even more reluctant to join than they were under RA because the precedent has been `set (against what they said when they came in, again) that we don't give managers time.
JPeterson – who said anything about "big names"? Olise is hardly a superstar. And he does seem like he would add something to our squad if he could stay injury free. Personally I like Madueke a lot, and think he has a big ceiling, but to say signing big names didn't work for us is overlooking the fact that we rarely bought either big names or proven PL talent in the later years of Abramovich apart from Kante (I don't count Lukaku as he was only really a big name in his own head – he hardly set the world alight in the PL at either Everton or United) – and we mostly spent money very badly from 2015 on (which we were all talking about on this forum at the time – Summer 2015 Michael Hector/ Papy Djilobodji/ Matt Miazga anyone? ) . All the PL talent we did buy during that time, apart from Chilwell, was reasonable compared to the fees we paid for the likes of Morata, Jorginho, Kova, Kepa etc.
24 Jun 2024 19:04:54
That is exactly the point Ed001.
We have/ had one of the best academies in the PL for years but despite that we have often bought players at great expense who are barely any better than the options we have had in the a academy.
That is being taken to a whole new level by the new owners and makes you wonder why the academy bother the develop young players except to sell on for a profit.
It can only lead to Chelsea being a less attractive option for local kids who should form part of the heartbeat of the side moving forward .
A classic example is we spend £40m on two Villa midfield kids but question whether Gallagher is worth a competitive contract.
It would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic.
24 Jun 2024 19:14:16
Oh for goodness sakes Tom, it isn't and has never been about getting more academy players into the first team, although there is a mounting body of evidence to suggest that would have been by far the most prudent thing to do over the last 5 years. In this particular case the fact is that we have spent an insane amount of money for an 18 year old who this time last year was bought for about 1/ 20th of what we have just paid, despite him doing nothing to suggest over those 12 months that he is any better than players of a similar age that are already at the club.
Now you can argue that by buying up lots of the best young talents we can end up with a top class squad. This presumes you are able to develop these players successfully which so far we have very little evidence to show we know how to do that.
Secondly, by routinely spending 20m on these players, you end up preventing yourself from taking advantage of an opportunity like Olise, where you have a player that is both young and ready to improve the first team immediately.
Thirdly, if these players don't go on to develop as you hope, you face a struggle to recoup the money you have spent on them. Its all well and good spending 5-10m on them, but we've dropped over 20m on about 5. If the future of football is really about being balanced financially, the likelihood is that you then end up needing to sell a player you want to keep in order to write off these failed experiments. The well of Cobham talents will run dry eventually, and then where does your 'pure profit' arrive from?
Surely it makes more sense to trust in the players you have in-house to furnish the squad, enabling you to spend on top class players you haven't got in the squad? Plus by regularly giving real meaningful minutes to these players, if they need to be upgraded upon you can legitimately point to their body of work and demand a significant fee, rather than selling them off for next to nothing a la CHO?
24 Jun 2024 19:28:48
EdW. maybe you have some evidence of so called “dodgy business” but I don’t.
24 Jun 2024 19:38:03
Ed, the comments about young players seems to me solely directed at our present owners when the previous owners also brought young player from overseas and uk clubs.
I also have issues with what I call “the pathway blocking” if so many of our academy players over many seasons.
Two England international centre halves leaving from a fan prospective looked and still looks like madness but maybe they wanted guarantees for playing time.
Im just an ordinary fan who is just guessing at what’s going on now and what was going on under RA. I know zero about player demands, contracts, FFP or our scouting system but I guess that unknown element is what makes a good banter site.
{Ed001's Note - it is nothing to do with player demands or contracts. It is the idiocy of trying to run an academy to make a profit, rather than to produce players for the first team. Profit should be a bonus, not the aim.}
24 Jun 2024 19:43:16
I can’t really add anything useful to what posters have said. I do find our apparent transfer strategy confusing. I think most of us wanted to bring in about 3 players who could be starters and take us up a level next season. I think we went off Duran because he wasn’t “ Hungry like a Wolf”.
24 Jun 2024 20:52:56
Some of the stuff in this thread is a joke. We spent £20m on Chucky like 2 seasons ago when he’d barely played a game and most on here seem to think he’s got great potential and yet now there’s some throwing their toys out the pram when we’re possibly about to do the same thing with Kellyman.
Then there’s those saying us buying 3 £20m youngsters has meant we can’t afford to get Olise. I would bet Kellyman, Washington, Angelo, Moreira AND Hutchison would be earning less than what Olise was wanting if the reported £250k/ week is right. Not to mention the fact that should we really be paying any player that much with an iffy injury record and off the back of a good half season?
Then finally whilst I don’t agree with all the youth signing and their potential blocking of Cobham graduates, to state it’ll stop local youth joining our academy is a farce. In the last 10 years up until recently we’d only had Terry make it in the first team. Didn’t stop Musiala, Mount, Guehi etc etc joining our academy. The fact remains that our academy produces fantastic players which then go on to have great careers currently. If the choice is to join our academy at 11-15 and go on to have a career like any of the above or to join other London clubs academies (only Rice at WH sticks out and he started out at Chelsea) I know which academy I’d be joining.
24 Jun 2024 20:55:22
Ed01, I think we are in agreement. My point this isn’t something that’s just happened with our current owners.
24 Jun 2024 20:56:28
Jimbo, love it. I can’t retort with any of there hit because it was a bit after my time!
24 Jun 2024 21:03:00
RBD, I thought I made it clear that I have misgivings about our young player recruitment and how it MAY effect a long term academy players.
My main point this is nothing new. I complained when we sold the lad to Palace, the lad to Newcastle and the lad to Milan. I’m not of the reasons for those sales but I found it disappointing that they were not given more of a chance.
24 Jun 2024 21:40:36
In my previous post I alarmed that the new owners are only interested in ripping the club through profit making leveraging on the gains made by roman but overlooked them. This is still just a start. Wait until palmer and others get sold in a few seasons. They want us to be like the arsenal of the old where they groom players into fine ones and sell 5hem for profits. Chelsea we are used to are gone with this rigged new owners imo.
24 Jun 2024 21:54:31
Mystic Tusole. It’s a business. Players will be bought and sold.
Fuser, I’m with you on seeing how these latest signings turn out before we become overly critical of our scouting of global talent.
None of this seems new to me. What is new is us being in mid table and then 6th and understandably us fans are looking for reasons.
24 Jun 2024 22:10:20
Fuser, I take your point about Chukwuemeka – but I saw him play for the England U19s (as captain? ) that summer when we apparently had no chance of signing him as Barcelona were interested, and he was electric, head and shoulders above the rest on the pitch in every game. I've never seen Kellyman play, nor had I heard about him before now. Chucky was 12 senior appearances that season to Kellyman's 6 (so perhaps £10 million would have been the right fee? Lol) .
Just to take issue with one thing you've said: Olise isn't coming off the back of half a good season. He's been nothing but quality for Palace since he signed for them – three years ago I think.
25 Jun 2024 00:18:39
Edw, 14 goals and 22 assists in 88 games over 3 years. Gives a 1 in 3 GA/ game roughly which isn’t bad but wouldn’t say fantastic. He’s definitely improved year on year whilst being there I’ll say that. But again should we making him our 2nd or 3rd highest paid player on the back of that and 3.5X what Palmer is paid?
Also 3 weeks ago it was being reported we had all but signed Duran for £42m, yet here we are now and he’s still not been signed and we’re looking at other options. A week ago it looked 99.9999% likely that Olise was going to sign for us and yet look where we are. All the news reports have been saying we’re paying €65m for Estevao, but turns out it’s only 29m upfront with half easily achieved add ons (to encourage him playing for the next year) and then the rest based on how we perform. So now with Kellyman it’s being reported we’re going to buy him for 19/ 20m, who’s to say in a weeks time if that’s going to even be true or it might turn out to be £10m upfront with add-ons etc. The constant toys being thrown every time we’re linked with a player is rather tedious, everyone is entitled to their opinions on whether a player is the right player for the club or too expensive etc, but do we really need to believe everything that the media say.
25 Jun 2024 09:56:42
Good post,
I am worried we’re relying too much on some these young talent and neglecting the first 11 and adding what we need, stock piling and blocking the path from the best academy in Europe, one off at least, going from Serie A top goalscorer and title winner to players who’ve started less than 10 games.
But, it’s early in the window, so let’s wait and see before the panic sets in, positives are fit nkunku, Jackson improved, lavia james fofana hopefully back fit, set piece coach in,