Chelsea may have to get creative in order to offload Ben Chilwell this month, with the defender refusing to take a pay cut to leave the club.
Chilwell joined Chelsea in a £50million move from Leicester in 2020 and still has two and a half years left on his contract worth £190,000 per week. He has been frozen out of the first team by Enzo Maresca, who has made it clear he doesn’t have a future at Stamford Bridge.
The left-back was left out of the squad for the Conference League – a competition in which Chelsea have given minutes to their fringe players – and his only appearance of the season was 45 minutes in a 5-0 Carabao Cup win over Barrow.
The 28-year-old is frustrated by the lack of game time but is equally unwilling to surrender his lucrative contract to help out the club who handed it to him. The Sun therefore reports that Chelsea may need to pay off Chilwell with a severance package, or arrange a heavily subsidised loan deal to shift him to another club in the January transfer window.
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He is one of five players who have been earmarked for a move this month, along with Carney Chukwuemeka, Cesare Casadei, Harvey Vale and Alex Matos. Chukwuemeka cost Chelsea £20m from Aston Villa in 2022, but has barely featured, with Maresca keen to work with a select group of players.
“There are players that unfortunately didn’t play a lot with us in all the competitions, like Chilwell, like Carney,” the Chelsea manager explained recently. “Probably they are the first that want to leave as they work every day, they train every day, they want to play games – and if they don’t play games they are thinking of leaving.
“So we’re going to see if some of them are coming to knock on the door and say I want to leave. For each player it’s a different situation.”
Ben Chilwell is not in Enzo Maresca’s plans
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Chilwell made just 13 appearances in the Premier League last season due to hamstring and knee issues – factors which added to the difficulty in finding a buyer over the summer after he missed out on England selection for Euro 2024. With the defender short of game time, those difficulties will remain in January, despite previous interest from Manchester United.
He was previously part of the Chelsea ‘bomb squad’ who were forced to train away from the main group in an effort to move them on. Speaking in September, Maresca explained: “We are going to sit with him and find a solution because he is the only one. He is probably going to be back with us in a training session, we will see, because right now he is not training with us.”
Asked if Chilwell could re-join the group, he added: “The reason why he is training apart is because the idea was for him to leave but because he didn’t find a solution, he is probably going to start to train with us.”
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