Chelsea transfer rumours: Reduce, reuse, recycle, Alex Telles edition
By George Perry
Alex Telles is the latest 2017 rumour to show up in Chelsea’s 2018 transfer rumour mill. The Blues’ transfer rumours almost all fall into two categories: previous summers’ targets, or Maurizio Sarri’s favourites at Napoli.
Chelsea’s transfer rumours are making silly season a slog. Alex Telles is the latest player to show up in the rumours who was a hot prospect and a potentially useful add in an earlier window, but is completely unnecessary and undesired now. Aside from players like Telles, most of the other transfer chatter is about Elseid Hysaj, Piotr Zielinski, Daniele Rugani and every other player with whom Maurizio Sarri has achieved some level of success.
Alex Telles was a reasonable transfer target last summer. Marcos Alonso did not seem like the long-term left wing-back and, if nothing else, needed depth and competition. Telles was a more physical tackler and far faster than Alonso. Adding him to the side would give Chelsea two players with complementary attributes to compete for and share a position – the perfect scenario for the manager.
Throughout 2017/18, Alonso’s performances made clear that someone would need more than speed and physicality to replace him. They would need to out-do him on every physical, technical and tactical dimension. Alonso grew into one of the world’s best wing-backs despite his deficiencies, in large part because he developed aspects of his game to compensate for them. No one, not Alex Telles, would have displaced Marcos Alonso last season.
Chelsea then bought a player with Telles’ profile in the January transfer window. Emerson is the pacey back-up to Alonso. While Telles would at least have arrived uninjured, Emerson’s injury only counts for so much. Had Chelsea bought Telles, his season would have gone much the way Emerson’s did.
So with Alonso firmly ensconced in the best XI as left wing-back and the prohibitive favourite to be left-back in a four-man defence, and with Emerson as his high-speed depth and ward against complacency, why the Alex Telles rumours?
How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? Who is John Galt?
Look, we don’t sit here thinking transfer rumours have many shreds of truth or indicate actual thought and activity at Stamford Bridge. You know as well as we do who the sources are who may have real insight via human relationships with the club. And you certainly (we hope) know what to do with anything from the S*n, the Mirr*r or any Twitter account of the “Adjective_PlayerName” format (sorry, @EbullientIvanovic, you know it’s true).
Perhaps this is just a by-product of the current dysfunctional nothingness at Chelsea. The legitimate sources are not hearing anything new, because no one at the club knows or is doing anything much themselves. We are merely downstream of nothing. In response, the less legitimate sources repackage what was once thought possible. Or they just mail it in by linking the current squad of whichever manager is leading the odds to replace Antonio Conte.
Maybe silly season is becoming a throw-back to an earlier era. What’s the point of speculating about how a player would fit into the side, what tactical adjustments would have to be made and what other transfers would stem from the move when every scenario can be played out in FIFA or Football Manager? Maybe attention spans are so short that anything from before May is new enough to be new to enough people.
Fortunately for old-timey transfer fans and those of us working against publication quotas, the transfer rumours may be old, but the reasons for or against them keep renewing. Case in point: Alex Telles. So here we are.
Next: Chelsea should have no qualms about selling David Luiz to Arsenal
Now who wants to start the Federico Chiesa to Chelsea rumour? @FastidiousCesc, I’m looking in your direction.