Chelsea: What’s in store for Tammy Abraham’s future?

Only a year ago, Tammy Abraham was being held aloft as Chelsea’s current and future No. 9. There was no need to enter the transfer market, no need to invest in a striker, Abraham and then manager Frank Lampard were clicking. The Blues needed to score more goals, but in Abraham, they had a striker that combined pace, height and decent poaching instinct. More so than anything else, he came through the ranks.

Abraham did everything right on his route to the Chelsea XI. He scored goals in lower divisions, he came into the team and offered a focal point; he connected well with the players around him and he established himself in the line-up. Under Lampard, Abraham even established himself as the first choice behind Harry Kane in the national set-up.

A year on from that and things could not be worse for Abraham. Yes, he is now a Champions League winner and some of his goals powered Chelsea into the latter stages of the tournament. However, he wasn’t given a chance to actually win the team the Champions League. He has barely featured under Thomas Tuchel, and has gone from one of the first names on the team sheet to rarely making it off the bench.

Perhaps most heartbreaking for Abraham is that if the Euros were to have happened last summer as scheduled, he would undoubtedly be in the England squad. Now, he has been usurped by Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Ollie Watkins and likely former Chelsea man Patrick Bamford in the pecking order. If you were Abraham, you might feel aggrieved and rightly so. Timo Werner, who was brought in to score goals, did not. Abraham and Werner both had 6 league and 12 total goals with Werner playing considerably more. Tuchel has also stuck with Werner blindly. When the German has been misfiring or generally poor, Tuchel has opted for Kai Havertz—which has worked to varying degrees—Champions League final excluding, of course.

If it isn’t about the goals then it appears that there likely is no route back for Abraham from Tuchel’s enforced exile. The 22-year-old is likely to follow the routes of Kevin De Bruyne, Mohammed Salah, Romelu Lukaku and now Fikayo Tomori; thus leaving the club right on the cusp of their powers.

All of this begs the question, what’s next in the career of Abraham?