England manager Sir Gareth Southgate called up Callum Hudson-Odoi to the senior squad this past week for the injured Marcus Rashford. Southgate is the latest to join the long list of people privy to the secret Chelsea are missing.
Callum Hudson-Odoi is one of the best young attacking players in world football and Chelsea should be playing him and paying him all they can. He should be starting every match at the club and on the verge of signing a five-year contract with a proper signing fee that will entice him to remember what playing for Chelsea means.
The knighted manager of England thinks Hudson-Odoi is good enough. Manchester United and Borussia Dortmund have now joined Bayern Munich in thinking the same. Yet somehow, Chelsea haven’t done a thing about it. Those clubs are in a better place than Chelsea at the moment and are equally known for their shrewd scouting, transfer ability and success with their youth acadwmies. A lot of simple common sense goes into saying that if they think he’s good enough to play for them, he likely is more than good enough to play for Chelsea.
To lose Hudson-Odoi to any of those clubs would be the sort of embarrassment no club or any supporter should ever have to endure. It’s not exactly an act of genius to see how good he or Jadon Sancho are and what they can do for a side. On the back of Sancho’s play Dortmund could very possibly win the title this season. Chelsea could be doing the same but chose otherwise.
How? Why?
How someone from the board hasn’t stepped in to solve this, telling Maurizio Sarri that the season is lost so he simply must play the young Englishman every game, makes no sense. How a contract offer in the £100,000 a week range hasn’t been leveled makes even less sense.
So little is going right at Chelsea, they defy any sense of logic or reason. If one is thinking strictly in the best interests of the young man, you would want him to leave. No real honest professional should seek an association with the club at the moment. It’s a black hole of ridiculousness, poor planning and management.
Yet somehow, as a supporter, you must also cling to hope. Maybe with a newfound dedication to youth the club could find a way to drag themselves out of the current mess?
It’s a terrible place to be at the moment. Chelsea should have realized they were going to lose Eden Hazard before this and started planning for the future. How the club’s best experienced player and best youth player are both in the same contractual situation is absurd.
The club is setting itself back years with every week they waste with this sort of madness.
This brings us back to how Chelsea could possibly be missing what everyone else seems to know so well. They have one of the most talented young players in the entire world and despite, results suffering and not much to lose, they continue to not play him, thus risking the only thing they really do have left to lose.
Something at Chelsea needs to change and soon, because things at the moment are entirely untenable.