Chelsea boss Graham Potter will reportedly be forced to make some tough decisions as a result of the club’s aggressive transfer strategy.
Chelsea have been left with an awkward selection headache ahead of the Champions League knockout stages as a result of their free-spending transfer policy over the course of the January window. The Blues splashed close to £300million on new players last month, with their expensive outlay accounting for 37 per cent of the combined total spent by all Premier League clubs.
Enzo Fernandez became Chelsea’s club-record signing for a fee of around £107m on deadline day, with the Argentina maestro joining the likes of Benoit Badiashile, David Datro Fofana, Mykhaylo Mudryk and Noni Madueke in moving to Stamford Bridge. However, the club’s aggressive recruitment strategy has led to a significant dilemma for Graham Potter, who will be forced to leave some of his new signings out of his Champions League squad for the knockout stages.
That’s according to the Evening Standard, who are reporting that Chelsea had 24 of their 25 spaces already filled before the January window. The departure of Jorginho to Arsenal will free up an additional place, though, which means that a total of just two new signings can be named in the squad to face Borussia Dortmund later this month as things stand.
It is said that only two of Fernandez, Mudryk, Badiashile and Joao Felix can be included before Chelsea will need to start removing some of their current players in order to make room for the others. Madueke is reportedly among those who will initially be forced to miss out, while Fofana and Andrey Santos are also expected to be overlooked.
Chelsea must have eight ‘association trained players’, including four homegrown stars, in their squad which suggests that Marcus Bettinelli or Carney Chukwuemeka could be dropped by Potter ahead of the submission deadline on February 2. Some players cannot be removed, though, such as injured striker Armando Broja due to his appearance on List B for under-21 players who have spent a number of years at the club.
The rules are different for the Premier League, though, with Fofana, Santos, Mudryk and Badiashile able to feature domestically as a result of them not needing to be registered thanks to their status as under-21 squad members. Felix, meanwhile, has already played in the Premier League, while there is also space for Fernandez to be included.
However, it remains to be seen which direction Chelsea will go in regarding their Champions League squad, with those dropped likely to be disappointed and even more so if the Blues manage to reach the latter stages of the tournament. Potter had already warned that the scale of Chelsea’s transfer activity in January could pose issues further down the line by insisting that it would be unreasonable to sign an entirely new squad in one window.
“We’ve got to be, not necessarily careful, but you’ve got to understand we’ve got 10 or 11 players unavailable and you can’t just sign players to replace those because then you’d have a squad of 30 and that is a problem,” said Potter after Chelsea’s win over Crystal Palace last month.
“So you have to do the right thing and look at what the right solutions are. Sometimes they are not aligned completely as you’d like them because the January window is complicated, but always my job is to try to support the club, make the right decisions, and help the team improve.”
SOURCE: express.co.uk
