Chelsea have repeated their Salah mistake by selling “mentality monster”
Enzo Maresca is an imperfect head coach, but there’s no denying the progress he has made at Chelsea since replacing Mauricio Pochettino at the end of the 2023/24 campaign.
Last season, Chelsea finished fifth in the Premier League and recovered their place in the Champions League, having gone two years without a taste of top-drawer European action.
The Blues are rebuilding, and their sights are set on the biggest prizes out there, aforementioned. The transfer strategy has been polished in the windows since those turbulent early BlueCo days, but there is work still to be done, even with exciting additions across the summer.
It’s not just ensuring Chelsea get bang for their buck with incomings, but getting it right when selling a first-teamer too. There have been a few to frustratingly slip through the Stamford Bridge turnstiles over the years.
Chelsea’s worst modern sales
Chelsea typically sell well. While the Londoners catch their rivals’ frustrations with big-money transfer windows, this is enabled through the calculated and extensive impetus on the exit front, raking in hundreds of millions each year.
Co-owner and Chelsea chairman Todd Boehly in the stands before the match
But it doesn’t always go to plan, and more historical cases would reveal the rueful sales of Mohamed Salah and Kevin De Bruyne, both of whom left Chelsea in the early stages of their careers and built themselves up in Europe before returning and cementing their legacies.
It would not be outrageous to claim that both would get into the Premier League all-time 11. Not outrageous, only contestable.
Romelu Lukaku also falls into that bracket, having left the young for Everton when young and since becoming one of the most prolific strikers of his generation. The fact that the Blues re-signed him for £97.5m and then he flopped emphasises the bungled club-player relationship.
Salah might be the most egregious of the lot, though, leaving for Roma in a £15m deal before returning to England two years later and going on to achieve greatness on Merseyside. Now he’s 33, still starring for an indomitable Liverpool team.
