Chelsea will loan more Golden Boy nominees than most clubs will ever own
By George Perry
The first list of candidates for the 2019 Golden Boy award came out yesterday. Chelsea lead all clubs with five nominees, three of whom will spend next season elsewhere.
Callum Hudson-Odoi, Mason Mount, Ethan Ampadu, Dujon Sterling and Marc Guehi are among the 80 players age 21 or younger on the long-list for the 2019 Golden Boy award. With 20 players nominated from Premier League clubs, Chelsea account for a quarter of the league’s nominees. Real Madrid and Arsenal trail the Blues with four youngsters in the running. No other Premier League club has more than two.
That is to say, Chelsea will send more Golden Boy nominees on loan than most clubs in England – or Europe, for that matter (only three European clubs have three players on the list) – will ever hope to have in a year.
Ethan Ampadu is the most recent young Blue confirmed for accession to the loan army, even though there have been no solid rumours about where he may land.
Several Premier League and Championship teams have been in the chatter, but – outside of the top six, which is not going to happen – only Southampton would be worth his time. The Saints combine the style of high-pressing play that would benefit Ampadu’s hybrid centreback / defensive midfielder with the youth development talent that Ralph Hassenhuttl displayed at RB Leipzig and that attracted Southampton’s interest (all those Liverpool stars of the future have to come from somewhere).
Dujon Sterling and Marc Guehi were among the seven Frank Lampard sent back after the first preseason game at Bohemians. Sterling has only one loan to his profile and Guehi, age 18, has not started his first-team career yet.
Hudson-Odoi’s chances of surviving future rounds of Golden Boy voting will take a hit from his injury at the end of last season, which will keep him out of the squad for much of the first half of 2019/20. However, he, like Mount, is a certainty to stay with Chelsea’s first team, despite the needless suspicious gloom around his contract delay.
The odds are against Chelsea’s nominees, overall. Despite all the top youth prospects Chelsea have developed over the years, none have ever won the Golden Boy. Two winners did play for the Blues later in their career, though: Cesc Fabregas and, um, Alexandre Pato.
Matthias de Ligt is strongly favoured to win, which would make him the first player with two Golden Boy trophies.
However, de Ligt recently transferred from Ajax – where he played just under 5,000 minutes across three competitions last season – to Juventus. His nomination for the Golden Boy is another stark reminder of how many years he has left to go before he reaches Maurizio Sarri’s minimum age for quality playing time. As he turns 20 next month, de Ligt still has three years until Maurizio Sarri can trust him in a starting XI.
The best scenario for de Ligt could be a similar progression under Sarri as Callum Hudson-Odoi and Ruben Loftus-Cheek had.
Come January, Juventus may start enough of an outcry that Sarri puts his club’s marquee signing on the pitch for the second half of the season. This would not do anything for de Ligt’s hopes of consecutive Golden Boy awards. However, if the pattern from Chelsea holds at Juventus, de Ligt can reignite his prospects in spring 2020 and get back atop the Golden Boy list for his last year of eligibility, and then carry that momentum into 2020/21 under a new manager for the bianconeri.
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