Chelsea waiting for Everton, Juventus to complete transfers before moving

Chelsea may not yet be in full-out panic mode, but they are in full-out reactive mode. Having waited this long and squandered their leverage, the Blues now must sit by until Everton and Juventus take care of their business before moving on to Ross Barkley and Alex Sandro.

Chelsea are updating SkySports’ Transfer Centre about as tensely and frequently as the rest of us. The Blues are waiting for Everton and Juventus to make their moves to strengthen their squads, which will make them open to a bid from Chelsea.

Everton and Swansea City are closing in on a deal that will send Gylfi Sigurdsson to Goodison Park. The Toffees raised their bid to £40 million plus add-ons. With Sigurdsson in hand Everton will be more comfortable unloading their wantaway midfielder Ross Barkley. Everton will hope to cover most of Sigurdsson’s sale with Barkley’s fee, although even in their current state of desperation the Blues will likely not pay more than £30 million for him.

Ross Barkley’s hopes of leaving Everton took a slight hit when he suffered a hamstring injury in training yesterday. However, given Chelsea’s penchant for signing injured midfielders, the injury could raise his prospects of swapping a blue kit for a Blue one.

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Everton are still assessing the extent of the injury but Premier Injuries has ruled him out for this weekend. Given Chelsea’s somewhat immediate need for a midfielder during Cesc Fabregas’ absence, they may not be willing to wait for Barkley and will move on Danny Drinkwater instead.

Meanwhile, Chelsea are waiting to see if Juventus recall Leonardo Spinazzola from Atalanta. Spinazzola is a serial loanee on the books at Juventus, coming up through the youth teams but without a first-team appearance. He played 32 games as left wing-back for Atalanta last season.

If Juventus bring Spinazzola back home, that may indicate they are ready to sell Alex Sandro to Chelsea. This, obviously, would happen despite the categorical denials of such a sale by various Juventus managers, and their rejection of Chelsea’s £52 million and £61 million bids.

Leonardo Spinazzola’s situation is very similar to many at Chelsea. At age 24 he has over 100 senior appearances as a loanee. He is at an age and place in his career where he should either be playing for his home club and moving on to a permanent station. Unless Juventus plan on making him their version of Nathan Ake, though, they will not recall him unless Sandro is on the way out.

However, they do not seem much more likely to sell Sandro than before. Chelsea’s insistence on pursuing Sandro only encourages Juventus to play harder-to-get. And that was before all the goings-on of the last week.

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At this point, Chelsea should just cut out the middle man and put in a bid for Spinazzola. Things worked out well the last time they signed an unknown wing-back from Serie A in late August. Perhaps they could catch Juventus so off-guard the deal would go through.