Charly Musonda slammed shut all but a few doors on his Chelsea career

Charly Musonda is a talented player, one who knows he is talented and believes he should be farther along the line than he is. He scuttled his opportunity at Chelsea, though, with his Instagram outburst.

Charly Musonda was the star of Chelsea’s academy. In the 2015/2016 season he rejected all summer loan opportunities, believing he could break into the team. He did not, and asked for a loan that January.

Eventually he accepted a move to Real Betis that could be extended for good performance. He played excellently at the end of that season and earned the 2016/2017 season on loan. That is where it fell apart at Betis.

New manager and former Chelsea player Gus Poyet rarely selected Musonda. Injury further hampered the young Belgian’s chances and the loan was terminated in January. He spent the remainder of the season at Chelsea recovering and getting fit once more.

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Fast forward to the current season and the story has gone back to the beginning. Musonda stayed at Chelsea believing he could break into the first team. The two most realistic times for him to play were against Qarabag (not in the squad) and Nottingham Forest (a start and excellent performance).

But it appears Musonda is still not happy. He took to Instagram to air his frustrations with his brother chiming in to point the finger at Chelsea (screen shots are forever).

It is easy to go with the knee jerk reaction that Chelsea have once again failed one of their star academy products. It is harder to step back and wonder what Musonda possibly thought he could gain from this.

For all of Musonda’s talent, he is currently sitting on exactly half a season of solid professional football. That was a year and a half ago. That is all he has to his name. And this season, he has Eden Hazard, Willian, and Pedro ahead of him in the pecking order. The match against Burnley showed that Jeremie Boga was also ahead of him.

Other than the match against Qarabag, the only match that it was realistic to see Musonda in was against Nottingham Forest. And he took that chance. With Willian and Pedro in poor form, he had the opportunity to build on it at the right moments.

He was never going to start or play a lot during the first half of the season. That was and is clear. So his social media outburst, fanned by his brother, is not only ill-timed, but is only damaging to Musonda’s career.

Antonio Conte will not put up with this type of lashing out. This is the man who benched Willian and Cesc Fabregas for most of last season. And when they were given chances, they gained the opportunity for more minutes if they played well. This is Conte’s modus operandi. He plays the players that fit his system and the ones that have earned a spot.

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So now Musonda is left with few options. He just destroyed his chances of playing for Chelsea again before January (bar any public apology). If he is to have any Chelsea career whatsoever, he will almost certainly go on loan. To prove his own point, it will need to be in the Premier League and he will have to excel.

But he has virtually no options in the Premier League. By virtue of being rivals for silverware and Champions League qualification, the top six – as Conte calls them – can be erased. All the teams that already have Chelsea loanees are out due to the FA’s rules.

And if Musonda is upset about playing time, putting him on a team with a former Chelsea academy player who left for minutes would be a terrible idea. This eliminates Watford, Southampton, and Bournemouth.

Teams that are doing unusually well will be unlikely to bring in a kid to right the ship if things turn south. So Burnley and Newcastle are out. And teams that are circling the drain will want more experienced players to fix things. So there goes West Ham and Everton.

Leicester have a hard enough time convincing Demarai Gray that he will get minutes, so there is no room for another young winger.

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That leaves just one option: West Bromwich Albion. And that is hardly ideal because Musonda is not the typical Tony Pulis-style winger. If Conte believes Musonda needs more muscle to play in the Premier League, then so will Pulis.

Musonda is now left with no direct way to prove himself. A return to La Liga could be in the cards, but it will do little to prove he can make it in the Premier League. Serie A could be an option with AS Roma registering interest repeatedly, and that would likely be Conte’s preference. Following Christensen’s path into the Bundesliga could also work as well.

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The only thing certain with the situation as it stands is that Musonda did himself no favors by standing up and making that post. There are moments in one’s career to do that, and moments not to. Musonda made a poor decision by choosing this one, and his career hangs in the balance as a result.