Ranking the entire bloated Chelsea squad by how likely they are to be banished from training

Dave Tickner 13 Aug 2024 2:26 PM

Which Chelsea stars are heading for banishment this season?

Pedro Neto has just become the 43rd player signing of the Todd Boehly era at Chelsea. It is quite a lot of players, that, isn’t it? In little more than two years?

It is in fact so very many players that Chelsea have now apparently completed it and are now going back to the start and attempting to sign players they’ve already signed, with Joao Felix possibly on his way back to Stamford Bridge after an underwhelming loan spell in 2023.

But while Chelsea have been absolutely brilliant at just signing all of the footballers – good, bad and indifferent – what they’ve proved less adept at is selling the ones they no longer want or need, apart from a couple of entirely coincidentally high-priced sales to clubs like Villa and Newcastle who had similar PSR problems to overcome.

And they’ve managed to get rid of the odd piece of unwanted clutter with free transfers. Hakim Ziyech and Malang Sarr are, alas, no longer Chelsea players.

They’ve still only barely scratched the surface, though.

Romelu Lukaku is not only still a Chelsea player but actually has two years left on his contract. How has this happened?

Clearly, Chelsea have too many footballers and you can’t just whack them all out on loan to Vitesse Arnhem these days.

With clearing the deadwood proving so difficult, poor innocent Chelsea have been left with just one option: banishing the players who are so despicably honouring the contracts Chelsea gave them.

So let’s rank all the current Chelsea squad by how likely they are to be banished and locked out of the first-team facilities for the unforgivable crime of not f***ing off to the first club that wants them.

1. Conor Gallagher
They thought they’d solved this one, and without even having to sell him to Spurs. Atletico Madrid seemed a much better outcome for all concerned, but a deal that appeared to be done now appears… less done. If Gallagher does return to Chelsea without completing that lucrative pure profit move to Spain, then you can be sure he will be instantly banished lest the new management team actually get a chance to see him and realise he’s much better than most of Chelsea’s other vast but meh assortment of midfield runner types.

2. Trevoh Chalobah
Is currently banished as Chelsea seek another pure-profit sale on a player who sits behind Wesley Fofana, Axel Disasi, Tosin Adarabioyo, Benoit Badiashile and Levi Colwill in the lengthy Chelsea defensive pecking order.

3. Romelu Lukaku
Also currently on the banished list is a man who has legitimately spent a decade being one of the very best strikers in the world, with Chelsea still apparently pretending this is an act of kindness to prevent players getting ‘false hope’ rather than just evidence of their own miserable and continuing mismanagement.

4. Armando Broja
The final member of the current banished trio alongside Chalobah and Lukaku, Broja finished last season with a goalless eight-game loan at Fulham and is currently most likely to end up at Stuttgart having been linked with assorted Premier League clubs who, for some reason, don’t appear to have been too keen to follow up their initial interest in a player with eight Premier League goals in 66 appearances.

MORE CHELSEA COVERAGE FROM F365
👉 Chelsea offered boost by Napoli to sign €100m striker as Romano confirms ‘only’ way for Blues
👉 Chelsea fan gives up on ‘dumpster fire’ as Manchester United optimism explained

5. Kepa Arrizabalaga
The most expensive and, we must at this stage assume, least wanted of Chelsea’s six first-team goalkeepers. Seriously, though. Six goalkeepers, Chelsea? Six? That’s insane.

Last seen winning the Champions League on loan at Real Madrid but a return to the Bernabeu doesn’t appear to be on the cards and that rather leaves Kepa in a state of limbo. And also, obviously, in exiled banishment.

Rarely if ever can the absurdity of a player and club’s positions been more accurately summarised than in a straight news headline that reads ‘£150,000-a-week star at risk of staying at Chelsea’.

6. David Datro Fofana
Chelsea want to find a buyer, but are currently only managing to drum up loan interest. Probably will therefore go out on loan – very possibly to Leicester – but that only delays rather than eliminates the very real prospect of a banishment because he appears nowhere near Chelsea’s first-team plans at this stage, nobody seems particularly keen to buy him, and he’s under contract until 2029.

7. Reece James
There really should be no way, but it actually feels enormously possible. On-pitch usefulness to Chelsea hampered by all those injury problems and the pure profit temptation is right there for a player who still has four years left on his contract. It wouldn’t be a goer at any other club, obviously, to banish your club captain to try and coerce him into leaving so you can balance the books before signing another toddler from South America for £35m, but we cannot stress enough that Chelsea are not any other club.

8. Mykhaylo Mudryk
Just feels like this is a season that can only possibly end with Mudryk either bagging double figures for goals and assists having finally cracked the Barclays code, or training with the kids after turning down a January loan move to Nottingham Forest.

9. Raheem Sterling
Just a player it’s all too easy to imagine suffering a banishment just because he’s had to handle a large amount of nonsense across what is by any sane measure an absurdly successful career, so why not a bit more?

He’s 29, has three years left on his contract, and therefore not that hard to see how he might be seen as someone who this particular club might come to view as one who offers more value to the balance sheet than the football pitch.

10. Omari Kellyman
Valued by Transfermarkt at £1m, bought by Chelsea from Aston Villa for something near £20m. It sure looks like mutually beneficial back-scratching, but maybe we should be less cynical. Maybe the clever scouts at Chelsea have spotted something nobody else has and the 18-year-old is about to kick on dramatically.

11. Carney Chukwuemeka
A reminder that significantly overpaying for Aston Villa academy products isn’t something Chelsea only started doing in the last few months. They have been proudly doing so for at least two years now.

12. Noni Madueke
Newcastle are interested in buying him and as he’s been at Chelsea 18 months he is presumably very much available for sale and thus also for banishment.

13. Benoit Badiashile
At its present state of bloat, Chelsea’s squad looks sure to contain at least one senior centre-back who finds themselves reduced to spare part. Badiashile looks a contender for this unwanted crown.

14. Nicolas Jackson
Last season was a very weird one for Jackson, a striker who often looked clueless but also scored a fair number of goals. And the appearance of cluelessness and scoring of goals were often not mutually exclusive either.

Point is, definitely a player whose season and thus Chelsea career could go either way and all too easy to imagine “Jackson determined to fight for his place at Chelsea” headlines and we know where and how that might end.

15. Levi Colwill
Rule nothing out because Chelsea have a lot of defenders and he’s a Cobham grad with all that lovely, lovely pure profit potential. Again, it’s an idea that would seem simply ludicrous for a homegrown player this good literally anywhere else, but here we are.

16. Lesley Ugochukwu
A potential loan target for Everton, like just about every Big Six fringe player in existence, after an injury-hit season last time out. Banishment feasible but there’s enough to think he should avoid that particular frying pan by leaping into the Goodison bonfire.

17. Robert Sanchez
They’ve clearly got far too many keepers and while we’re not at all sure which one of them has the greatest potential to join Kepa on the sh*tlist we’re pretty sure one of them will.

18. Djordje Petrovic
Ended the season as Chelsea’s first choice but absolutely no guarantee that this remains the case because Chelsea. Probably less likely than Sanchez to be in the exile spotlight but with all those keepers knocking around the place we’re ruling absolutely nothing out.

19. Filip Jorgensen
Has just arrived for about 20 million quid and we’re not really sure at this stage whether he’s first-choice or third. What a club this is. Maybe one day we’ll learn precisely why Chelsea are stockpiling goalkeepers. Some as yet undefined but nefarious purpose that exploits some hitherto unspotted PSR loophole, no doubt.

The upshot is that probably two of these three keepers are far too high on this list, but the other one is far too low. We are positively tumescent with excitement at finding out who’s who.

20. Caleb Wiley
At a normal club, signing a teenaged left-back for £10m and immediately loaning them out to a decent club in a decent European league would appear a solid, normal and unremarkable bit of speculative squad building. At Chelsea, though, it always makes us wonder what exactly they’re up to.

21. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall
Good player, but we’re not sure he particularly solves anything in this Chelsea squad. Ergo he will either end this season with Chelsea desperate to sell him with the banishing stick being unsheathed if necessary, or he will be player of the year.

22. Ben Chilwell
Slightly vulnerable, you’d think, if Marc Cucurella turns up this season with his Spain form.

23. Eddie Beach
Chelsea have taken a risk and allowed their 20-year-old seventh-choice goalkeeper to join Crawley Town on loan. Presumably with a call-back clause if they suffer a series of misfortunes to their bare-bones goalkeeping stocks.

24. Marcus Bettinelli
Seems less likely than the other goalkeepers to be headed for Banishmentville purely because there’s just not really that much point.

25. Lucas Bergstrom
Yet another goalkeeper, but relatively lowly here because he’s surely going out on loan again and the window for mutually beneficial high-priced transfers of low-value players is currently closed.

26. Andrey Santos
Does feel distinctly banishable somehow after that ill-fated Forest loan, but he’s now back at Strasbourg on loan for the season having impressed there in the second half of 23/24 and is therefore quite safe. For now.

27. Diego Moreira
The Portugal Under-21 winger has only once made it as far as a Premier League bench for Chelsea, but there is no banishing in his immediate future. Not least because it would raise the philosophical question of whether a 20-year-old can in fact be banished to the Under-21s when they are in fact under 21.

28. Deivid Washington
Again, his age makes it complicated. Given he’s only had a couple of brief first-team runouts and is still only 19, it would require some degree of malice even for us to describe him training with the Under-21s as a banishment or exile.

29. Angelo
Another 19-year-old, who is already described by Transfermarkt as a ‘former’ Brazil Under-20 international. Brutal.

30. Cesare Casadei
The young Italian midfielder returned from what is now a far more significant loan at Leicester in January and was involved in a lot of games in the second half of last season, which was also the half of the season where Chelsea were notably less bad. However, not one of his 11 appearances in the Premier League lasted longer than 15 minutes with four of them clocked at one minute.

We reckon making 11 appearances that total out at only 71 minutes must be some kind of record and if we could be remotely bothered or frankly knew how to go about working it out, we would confirm that.

31. Aaron Anselmino
Presumably he’s one of the two biggest gossips on Chelsea’s staff. He’s also gone straight back to Boca Juniors on loan and is thus at no imminent risk of banishment.

32. Marc Guiu
We like to amuse ourselves by imagining there was some kind of admin mix-up and Chelsea were actually trying to re-sign Marc Guehi to add to their vast collection of centre-backs, perhaps with one eye on trying to sell him for Pure Profit again.

33. Bashir Humphreys
Promoted from the Under-21s to the seniors just to get a real close-up look at the way Chelsea treats it hugely promising and even beloved academy graduates.

34. Tino Anjorin
It must be so inspiring for these former Under-21 lads to watch Chalobah and Broja and know that with a bit of hard work and commitment it could be them back training with the kids in a few years’ time as Chelsea try to force them out for that sweet pure profit nectar.

35. Marc Cucurella
Just enough evidence at the end of last season to offer the tantalising prospect of Cucurella replicating his spectacular Spain form in a Chelsea shirt this season. Otherwise he’d have looked ripe for a ‘cash in on the back of a big tournament performance’ sale for a club run more sensibly than this one.

36. Axel Disasi
Pretty significant figure last season and only likely to be more so this time around with Thiago Silva no longer here. An unlikely candidate for a banishment, even given Chelsea’s overstocked central defence.

37. Moises Caicedo
Struggled at times in his first season at Chelsea but little indication that either party are currently looking to end the relationship so should be fine for now.

38. Alfie Gilchrist
An academy grad but banishment potential significantly reduced by currently being out on loan and having only a year left on his contract when he returns from Sheffield United next summer. Surely not enough sweet pure profit available there to make it worth the hassle.

39. Wesley Fofana
One of the unluckier Chelsea transfers of recent years with injuries clearly the main reason it hasn’t worked out. Is now back fit again and has been involved in pre-season but the biggest reason he’s relatively safe from a banishment is that surely even Chelsea would realise the optics on that would be particularly bad.

40. Renato Veiga
A defensive midfielder primarily, but also versatile enough to fill in at the back. His centre-backery is unlikely to be required in this Chelsea squad, but it’s not remotely hard to see how he ends up doing some heavy left-back lifting in the Europa Conference. That combined with being one of the fresh arrivals not immediately packed off on loan suggests only a very slim chance of banishment at this stage.

41. Malo Gusto
Extremely safe due to Chelsea’s really quite alarming lack of right-back depth given the absurd squad bloat in evidence elsewhere. If we didn’t know better, we might even think that having 417 midfielders but only two first-team right-backs – one of which is the treatment room’s Reece James – is evidence of some shoddy squad-building. But that can’t be right.

42. Pedro Neto
He’s only just got here. If he’s away from the first-team training pitch then it’s probably because the poor sod’s injured again.

43. Romeo Lavia
Chelsea and Liverpool fighting tooth and nail to sign Lavia from Southampton last summer feels like a very long time ago now, doesn’t it?

Injuries obviously completely wrecked his first season at Chelsea, but he appears to be back in good shape now having been one of Chelsea’s busiest and most impressive performers in pre-season. There will be no banishment here, with Lavia instead seemingly nailed on for ‘like a new signing’ status, which is admittedly less of a compliment at Chelsea than at most clubs given the general trend for how new signings have performed in recent times.

44. Tosin Adarabioyo
It’s almost impossible to successfully predict which Chelsea transfers will actually work but, while their need for more centre-backs wasn’t overwhelmingly apparent, the free-transfer acquisition of one with Tosin’s Premier League-proven qualities really should be a half-decent one.

Hard to see how this goes wrong really, and thus we are eager to find out.

45. Enzo Fernandez
Chelsea went to great lengths to avoid handing out any apparent punishment whatsoever this summer to the one player who probably deserved a little bit of banishment, so we’re going to go right ahead and assume they’re not about to now ostracise him any time soon for their usual tish and fipsy reasons of being annoyed about you honouring your contract. As ever, though, the Chelsea caveat applies: this is a batsh*t club where nothing can or should be ruled out

46. Cole Palmer
Not even Todd Boehly could sanction 43 transfers in 26 months without one of them turning out to be pretty good. It’s the coconut shy theory writ large, and on this occasion Boehly won himself a goal-contribution-delivering goldfish. It genuinely boggles the mind to think where Chelsea might currently be without him, and hilarious to think that of all the many, many transfers Chelsea have completed this was at the time quite understandably viewed among the oddest and least explicable.

Hopefully it makes Todd feel a bit better to realise we’re all pretty clueless, but it seems unlikely for a man tragically born without self-awareness to even realise he’s getting anything wrong.

F365 Features