Everton could be about to make the shrewdest signing of transfer deadline day - at Chelsea's expenseplaceholder image
Everton could be about to make the shrewdest signing of transfer deadline day - at Chelsea's expense | Getty Images
Everton could be the latest beneficiaries of Chelsea’s mistakes in the transfer market - and may make the best buy of transfer deadline day.
For a side which seemed set to stay relatively quiet in the January transfer window, Everton may just be about to pull off one of the best deals of the window – assuming their bid for Chelsea’s Tyrique George goes through as planned.
A number of reports suggest that Everton will sign the 19-year-old forward on an initial loan deal with an option to buy at the end of the season. It’s a signing which could prove to be cost-effective, low-risk and give Everton’s attack the injection of youthful vigour it has needed for some time. But just how smart of a move will it be for Everton?
Why Everton could be getting the deal of the winter by signing Tyrique George
At first blush, George’s raw numbers aren’t especially remarkable for a forward, one who can play on either the left wing or through the centre – two goals in 23 matches last season, three in 11 so far in the current campaign. But they bely the impact he has had on a minute-by-minute basis.
George, who has impressed in his appearances for England’s Under-21s, has only started 15 games in all competitions for Chelsea, many of them in cup competitions, and has scored his six senior goals to date (including one in last summer’s Club World Cup) at a rate of one every 271 minutes, roughly a goal every three matches – and has provided assists at an identical rate. For a young player who rarely plays a full 90 minutes or strings two starts together, a goal contribution every 1.5 matches is a highly impressive feat, especially when most of his playing time thus far has been in wider positions.
At the heart of George’s performances is a combination of a quick burst of pace and clever movement which has made him a headache to defend against – alongside the confidence to take defenders on both with and without the ball and to shoot from difficult positions. Many of his goals and assists have come from his ability to get into space other forwards might struggle to find and then to exploit it with a self-assuredness that isn’t universal even at the highest level.
That’s a skillset Everton need up front to make the most of David Moyes’ relatively direct style of play. It’s also a skillset they haven’t had in abundance in recent years. Iliman Ndiaye has it, but is increasingly being linked with a move away from Merseyside. Jack Grealish has it, but is out for the rest of the season and is, in any case, only on loan with no guarantee that he will be a Toffee in the long term.
In signing George, they would be getting a player who can get into space behind defenders to take advantage of long passes, and who can take defenders on and beat them when playing on the counter-attack – and who scores and provides goals at a faster rate than either Ndiaye or Grealish have managed so far this season.
There have, perhaps inevitably, been moments when George has taken the wrong option in a promising position, or betrayed his inexperience by biting off more than he can chew when taking a defender on. Try finding a young winger who doesn’t make those mistakes – and then try and find one whose scoring record is better, pound for pound, than George’s at this point in his career. Once he has been given the minutes to polish off his rough edges, there is every shred of evidence that he will become a reliable threat in the Premier League.
The nature of the deal means that Everton won’t even be taking much of a gamble if George doesn’t settle in well at the Hill Dickinson Stadium or disappoints for any other reason – while the finances of the deal are yet to be revealed (at least at the time of writing), reports suggest that this will be a loan with an option to buy, not an obligation, with most of the fee backloaded into the purchase clause rather than paid as part of the loan. If Everton are given cause to get cold feet, their loss will be minimal.
Why Chelsea are making yet another mistake letting George go
The question mark in these scenarios, where a deal almost seems too good to be true, is whether the selling club know something that the general public (and football columnists) don’t. With Chelsea, however, this is a likely mistake which has been made before.
This is a side who have, on several occasions, sold young players for a quick buck because of their incessant need to fund their moves for the next big thing, rather than focussing on the next big thing they might already have on the books.
Chelsea are a club who are constantly on the brink of running afoul of UEFA’s spending rules – their move to sell their women’s team to their owners’ holding company steered them around the Premier League’s PSR regulations but not UEFA’s own financial fair play rules – and generating income from players like George is the only way they can keep affording to sign their next Alejandro Garnacho without running into regulatory problems down the line.
George has, thus far, been more effective game by game than Garnacho has been, but with youngsters arriving at Stamford Bridge on a near constant basis, the club keep finding themselves forcing the talent they already have out. Some of that young talent may turn out to be an upgrade – one can hardly criticise them for the purchase of Estêvão Willian, for instance – but it’s Chelsea’s idiosyncrasy that they can’t help themselves from assuming that the bright young thing currently playing for another club must be better than the player already developing at Cobham.
Chelsea, to their credit, often make a very healthy profit on such deals, but it’s hard not to wonder whether they would have been better off keeping hold of Noni Madueke, or Lewis Hall, or Renato Veiga, or any one of a number of other talented young players currently making names for themselves on the continent. Their obsession with treating the development of young players as a business opportunity instead of an investment in their own squad’s future has been to the benefit of several other sides – perhaps now including Everton.
There is every reason to believe that George has a bright future ahead of him, and Everton will now get a chance to try before they buy into that potential. Perhaps, once the dust has settled on the January transfer window, this will look like the best deal of the lot.
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