Chelsea: Three players the club needs to sell this summer
By Hugo Amaya
Chelsea is cleaning house with the departure of some senior players and because of financial and quality reasons, there are three players that need to go.
Chelsea is finally cleaning house and getting rid of those seasoned players that either no longer fit Lampard’s style or simply refused to agree to contracts. Whatever the departure of Willian and Pedro mean for the squad, this was the perfect time for the transition. More importantly, Chelsea just signed two new players that can fill the gaps in the respective positions.
Nevertheless, Chelsea still needs to let go of a lot more players before the start of next season in a month’s time, here are the three players that the Blues need to get rid of this summer:
1. Emerson
The Italian international was brought on to compete with Marcos Alonso at left back/left wing-back, but ended up being a last resort replacement. The Blues were truly chasing Juventus’ Alex Sandro when Antonio Conte stumbled upon a realistic, cheaper alternative in Emerson. On paper, Emerson is a versatile fullback with a lot a pace who can cross the ball and defend counter attacks. This, of course, proved to be a botched scouting job because he has no field awareness, he’s incapable of crossing the ball and has no positive defensive attributes. In other words, Emerson is not technical, nor physical enough to play at Chelsea.
Furthermore, despite his speed on the field, he is never back into position in time to defend any counter attacks. This means that while he stays wandering around in the opposition’s half, the midfielders need to put themselves into overdrive to patch up his mistakes.
Therefore, in order to fund a new left back, the club must do everything in its power to sell Emerson for a reasonable price, even if it’s not at a profit. Italy seems to be the best landing spot as he’s drawn interest from both Inter Milan and Juventus.