Should Chelsea start getting worried about Antonio Rudiger?

With Gianluigi Donnarumma’s save against Bukayo Saka in Wembley last Sunday, the curtains fell on the 2020 European Championship and most teams have already begun their pre-season activities. With teams deciding which players to keep on and which ones to move along.

So far, the only major transfer done by Chelsea FC has been the sale of young Fikayo Tomori to AC Milan; a decision I feel unwise, especially since the only senior center-back we have left, with more than a year on his contract, is the much-maligned Kurt Zouma.

The club rightfully took up the option to extend Thiago Silva’s contract for another year, while Rudiger and Andreas Christensen enter this season with just one year left on the contracts they signed in 2017 and 2018 respectively. As things stand, they will both be free to negotiate pre-contract terms with overseas teams in January and leave for free, as they are both above 25 years old.

While Thiago Silva has held his own in the Premier League and has been vital in our push to the top of English and European football, his substitution in the Champions League final was another red flag that his age is catching up to him. He can not be expected to compete throughout the season. In our starting back three from last season, Azpilicueta may be captain reliable and Silva the silent monster, but Rudiger is the dark horse that bites, claws and kicks at every attack that comes our way. The risk of losing him on a free should make every Chelsea fan shudder. One could go on to say no player has dominated that left center back position in a back three as well as he did last season.

Rudiger has always been a combative player. On his right,  Thiago Silva seems to do everything effortlessly, but Rudiger always wears his heart on his sleeve; jumping into tackles, harassing opponents, and always in the middle of a good old-fashioned brawl. Some have said that his 57th-minute collision with Kevin De Bruyne, which left the Belgian with a broken nose and a fractured eye socket, made it easier for Chelsea to better manage the UCL final.

According to whoscored.com, The Berlin-born mountain averaged 1.6 tackles, 0.9 interceptions, and 2.7 clearances per game while committing just 0.8 fouls per game. He was rock-solid in defense and helped Tuchel get 11 clean sheets in his first 15 Premier League games.

Another understated quality he possesses is his crisp passing and the ability to drive forward from the defense. With Tomori gone, Rudiger is, without doubt, the fastest center back in our books. Whoscored.com give him 89.4% pass accuracy, while he was only behind Real Madrid’s Toni Kroos (66) and former Manchester United defender Daley Blind (48) in passes to the middle third during EURO 2020 with 39. So, why the apparent hesitation?

There seems to be a mixture of factors holding the German back from possibly signing a new contract. Rudiger was frozen out of the team under Frank Lampard for a large part of the first half of the season, to the point he had more minutes for Germany than for Chelsea. In fact, as of 20th December 2020, he had only featured in five of the 21 games Chelsea had played, only appearing once in the Premier League, A 2-0 win over Newcastle. Lampard preferred the pairing of Zouma and Thiago Silva. He also felt unfairly targeted after Lampard was sacked. To compound all this, he felt that no one from the administrative side of the club, Chairman Bruce Buck or Marina Granovskaia, came out to support him during these difficult times. He revealed how close he was to leaving in the Summer:

"When you look back to the summer, there were points I wanted to leave. Because if you think about my age, what’s coming up this summer, the Euros and everything, I didn’t see myself in the squad for one month so my first thought was to leave. It was kind of close, there were serious talks but it didn’t happen.Then I stayed, I had a chat with Frank and then I was back in the squad. I got some game time and then towards the end of Lampard’s reign, I started to play a bit more. Then I said to myself: ‘OK, let’s see what happens.’ Then my mindset was to work my way back, the change came and things went well and my relationship with Thomas Tuchel is normal and there’s a respect there which is how it should be.“At the end of the day, the coach has his vision of football and how he wants us to perform and he backs it 1,000 per cent. You can see it on the sidelines. It’s like a tunnel vision, he has things in his mind and he wants us to perform like that.”Antonio RüdigerSource: Mirror.co.uk"

The consensus was that contract talks would begin after the EURO games, but it has been over two weeks since Germany was knocked out by England and the silence has been deafening. Considering the lack of upgrades to Rudiger in the market and the crazy prices being thrown around (£50m for Ben White?) it would be wise for Marina to start calling Rudiger’s agent.