Some cup ties and some Premier League minutes will be too little, too late if Chelsea want to keep Callum Hudson-Odoi. The club’s record – and that of his suitor, Bayern Munich – say all there is to say.
We all enjoy a good laugh about the creative ways Tottenham define success in the complete absence of trophies. Keeping the pressure on, players’ national team success, commemorative DVD’s… you know the list. Over the last few weeks, though, Chelsea watchers have done something similar to justify to themselves why Callum Hudson-Odoi should stay as Chelsea and Bayern Munich negotiate over a transfer fee. Five appearances with two starts (don’t mention they were Europa League dead rubbers) is apparently just about right for a player of his age, talent and development stage.
If we were talking completely in a vacuum, that would almost be a defensible statement. Hudson-Odoi was 17 when the season started and turned 18 in November. So far, his playing time is comparable to the other players we’re about to meet at that precise age.
But Chelsea is the land of plateaus. Chelsea will occasionally give a teenager a few hundred minutes in a season. Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Nathan Ake, Bertrand Traore, Kenedy, Tomas Kalas and Andreas Christensen all had the perfunctory run-outs and lesser competition starts in their years under 21. None of them broke 1,000 minutes in a season until they left on loan. That includes Ruben Loftus-Cheek, who stayed with Chelsea’s first team for three full seasons before decamping to Selhurst Park for respectable playing time.
Loftus-Cheek is now closer than ever to reaching 1,000 minutes in a Chelsea season. Fingers crossed he stays healthy.
Meanwhile, over at Liverpool, 20-year old Trent Alexander-Arnold has played 1,820 minutes this season: roughly twice as many as Loftus-Cheek. In his debut season with the Reds’ first team in 2016/17 he played 590 minutes, which then rocketed five-fold to 2,654 last season. No Chelsea teenager has ever experienced so many minutes in his debut season. Nor has any player had an increase of that magnitude unless they spend a few seasons on loan before returning to Stamford Bridge (e.g., Andreas Christensen).
But we’re supposed to be talking about Bayern Munich, since they are Callum Hudson-Odoi’s likely destination.
Kingsley Coman went to Bayern Munich from Juventus. In his first season at Bayern he played 2,352 minutes. His next two seasons saw over 1,000 minutes and over 1,800 minutes. Joshua Kimmich had a similar experience. He played over 2,000 minutes in his first season at Bayern as a 20-year old, matched that the next seasons and approached 4,000 minutes last season.
These are the players – along with others like Juan Bernat – who give Hudson-Odoi more than hope for his future at Bayern Munich. They give him rational expectations of what his future could be in Germany.
They are the precedents that attract him, just as Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Andreas Christensen, Nathan Ake are the precedents at Chelsea whose history of stoppage time appearances and loans hold no interest for him. And that is without even mentioning Chelsea’s desultory record of players who had the same smattering of teenage minutes and are still in the loan army, or whose careers are completely off the rails.
Kimmich, Coman, Bernat (let’s just throw Alexander-Arnold on this side for good measure) vs. Loftus-Cheek, Baker, McEachran, Kalas, Piazon. Which would you choose?
Bayern Munich is no guarantee of weekly starts and international success for Callum Hudson-Odoi. That uncertainty, though, is a compelling proposition compared to the certainty offered by Chelsea: the certainty of travelling with the team but not being in the squad, the certainty of picking up late minutes and lesser-opponent cup starts, the certainty of loans and the certainty of watching your peers pass you by. The certainty of being told to work hard in training and not worry about minutes, and then being told a few years later you don’t have enough minutes for your age.
Bayern Munich have a record of buying young players from top clubs and providing them the opportunities to prove themselves worthy of the club and its ambitions. They give the player some level of control over their future, all while retaining their place in the top tier of football. They are – on this topic, at least – the anti-Chelsea. Hudson-Odoi knows what Chelsea are, which leaves him with only one place to go.