Could Chelsea make a surprising bid for a West Ham starlet this summer?placeholder image
Could Chelsea make a surprising bid for a West Ham starlet this summer? | AFP via Getty Images
Chelsea have been linked with a surprise bid for a young West Ham star - but is the transfer really on the cards?
Whether or not they ultimately find themselves in the Premier League’s top four this season, Chelsea are likely to have a busy summer ahead of them – but also one somewhat constrained by the club’s financial position.
Chelsea posted a record £355m pre-tax loss last season, creating difficulties in terms of the club’s compliance with UEFA’s spending rules. Despite that, there is still a clear need to bring in new players in several positions and to reshape the squad to more closely match the requirements of new manager Liam Rosenior.
All of that won’t come cheap, but one potentially budget-friendly deal has been floated in the gossip columns over the last few days – a move for West Ham’s El Hadji Malick Diouf. But is the young full-back good enough to make the difference at Stamford Bridge, and is a move really realistic?
Why Chelsea might be interested in signing El Hadji Malick Diouf this summer
Diouf has enjoyed a promising first season in English football since signing for West Ham from Slavia Prague last summer, but hasn’t necessarily been a dominant figure – although quick and strong on the overlap down the Hammers’ left flank, he has defensive flaws which need patching up, and to see Chelsea linked with him is perhaps a little surprising.
His dynamism and knack for finding and exploiting space has earned him five assists and he has given plenty of opposing full-backs issues over the course of the season, but he is not a first-rate technician and is neither an accurate passer nor a particularly exceptional dribbler, which can limit him in narrower spaces.
Diouf is also a defender who has made occasional positional errors and particularly seems to find life difficult when quick, skilful winger come at him at speed. That isn’t unusual for young and aggressive full-backs, but still an area of concern in the near future.
Given that Diouf is still only 21, there is plenty of room for him to develop, but it’s difficult to see him immediately pushing a more experience and well-rounded player like Marc Cucurella for his place. If this is indeed a deal that Chelsea are interested in doing, it’s likely one based more on potential than present ability or production.
Still, he has the natural athleticism to become a highly effective player, and with the right coaching could easily be a strong addition to a team that wants a full-back who can bomb forward on the overlap – something Chelsea lack right now, with Cucurella and his deputy Jorrel Hato both players more comfortable operating in deeper areas and playing passes than they are hitting the byline. It may be that Chelsea’s interest is a symptom of a change Rosenior wants to make within his tactical system.
The story linking Chelsea to Diouf seems to have started with a story from The Hard Tackle, and hasn’t yet been corroborated by any more mainstream media outlets. So just how likely is it that Chelsea strike a deal, and how much might it cost?
Will Chelsea sign West Ham’s Diouf?
Players don’t move between London rivals especially often, and were West Ham to remain in the Premier League next season then it’s hard to imagine them being content to sell a promising asset to a rival – especially at the price suggested by West Ham World, who have embellished the original story.
They claim that the player is currently valued at just £24m, a mere £5m more than West Ham paid to sign Diouf last summer. That would likely not represent a sufficiently strong profit to induce the Hammers to sell up. Unless, of course, they go down.
At that point, when selling players to make up for the financial losses caused by relegation would become a necessity, all bets would be off and such a deal would likely represent good value for West Ham. They wouldn’t necessarily want to sell Diouf to Chelsea, but wouldn’t be in an especially strong position to refuse offers.
As it stands, however, it’s hard to believe that Chelsea are prioritising a deal for the young Senegalese full-back without further corroboration from the media. This remains a single-sourced story, with other outlets’ articles on the subject all seemingly stemming from The Hard Tackle’s report. That doesn’t necessarily make it inaccurate, but a single, unbylined piece from a gossip website is not necessarily the strongest source to build from.
This looks more likely to be idle gossip than a carefully-sourced story for now, although it wouldn’t be the first time that a gossip website has found a genuine scoop, and nor would it represent a departure from Chelsea’s youth-focussed transfer policy if a bid was eventually made – but there’s far too little evidence of Chelsea’s interest to make it look likely that a deal happens for now, especially when Diouf is a very different type of full-back from those currently employed at Stamford Bridge.
We would be surprised if this transfer happened, but perhaps the rumour’s existence alone is a fair testament to Diouf’s potential, and maybe even the way that elite sides view him as a future prospect.
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