Chalobah next? Seven other players Chelsea ‘banished to the reserves’, all under different managers
Trevoh Chalobah has been ‘barred’ from using ‘the first-team facilities’ at Chelsea until he agrees to move. It is a frequent and awful transfer tactic.
Chalobah, along with fellow academy graduate Armando Broja and Romelu Lukaku, has been told to train with the club’s development squad while they find new clubs as there is no place for them in the senior side under Enzo Maresca.
New manager Maresca is thus the latest head coach whose tenure has been marked by players being banished to the reserves, a fate which Conor Gallagher was threatened with before he agreed to leave for Atletico Madrid.
It appears to be a proud and really quite unnecessary club tradition at this point.
Florent Malouda
“We will go for the league and Champions League next season,” Malouda pledged when he signed a Chelsea contract extension in summer 2009. While they had to settle for a mere Double under Carlo Ancelotti by the end of that season, few players were as important to the cause as the France international.
Malouda won six trophies in as many seasons at Stamford Bridge, but his best form was brief enough to coincide only with the Guus Hiddink interim spell and the first half of Ancelotti’s reign. The last of those half dozen campaigns was spent entirely with the reserves.
It was trusted Roman Abramovich aide Marina Granovskaia who made the call to banish Malouda from the first team after his wage demands proved prohibitive for a move to France or Brazil. Malouda kicked up no fuss but simply felt he did not have to take a pay cut, posting in September a picture of the academy building, the words ‘Under 21’s Players & Staff only’ framed perfectly, explaining ‘this is where I’ll train for my last season’.
The winger was true to his word, not making a single matchday squad in 2012/13 before being released and joining Trabzonspor on about half of what Chelsea had agreed to pay him for a little longer than they had hoped.
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Nicolas Anelka and Alex
That all transpired under Roberto Di Matteo, who navigated a similar situation slightly better than Andreas Villas-Boas before him.
John Terry recently bravely relived the ordeal senior Chelsea players were forced to go through under the Portuguese, somehow managing to reflect on how they had to refuse to board a plane on a pre-season tour because “we’re not going anywhere until these young players go back in economy, and the first team players that have built this club to where we are today go back in first class”.
That fight only continued for Anelka and Alex, who both featured intermittently in the first half of the 2011/12 season until the decision made in early December to ban them from first-team training and even lock them out of the dressing room after they handed in transfer requests ahead of the January window.
Anelka took a pay rise at Shanghai Shenhua, while Alex eventually joined PSG. They have about as much claim to one of those Champions League winner’s medals as Villas-Boas.
Billy Gilmour
“When I came back from my loan from Norwich, I came back and had pre-season and I just wasn’t in the plans. I ended up leaving pre-season with the first-team to go with the reserves. So we were in America for pre-season and then me and two other boys got told there’s not going to be really a chance here, we’re not going to have another opportunity, we’re going to send you with the reserves.”
Gilmour was among those whose first-team prospects onlookers feared for when Frank Lampard was sacked in January 2021. Having been slowly blooded into the side from the academy by that point, the appointment of Thomas Tuchel changed the complexion of his career.
A disappointing loan with Norwich put the midfielder further on the back foot and Chelsea sensed a transformative opportunity: Gilmour was not only the first pure profit sale of the Clearlake era, but the first permanent deal with Brighton conducted by Todd Boehly and friends.
Malang Sarr
The reserve-team banishment is basically a rite of passage for any Chelsea manager, and Mauricio Pochettino ensured his would go down in infamy for one specific moment.
When asked to clarify the futures of Malang Sarr and Jamie Cumming during a routine press conference, the manager interjected with a baffled “who?” upon mention of the former’s name, then offered a simple “oh my goodness. I don’t know what I can tell you”.
That response had already said more than enough. Sarr was a free signing under Lampard in 2020 and left by mutual consent when his contract was cancelled in July 2024 after a full season of training with the under-21s. His last Chelsea appearance came in May 2022.
Winston Bogarde
Eleven appearances. Four years. £40,000 a week. The greatest to ever do it, and the man who played Chelsea at their own game and won.
