The turnover of players at Chelsea is unlike any other Premier League club, with the Blues’ academy as prolific as the club chiefs are in the transfer window.
No club has a perfect record when it comes to player turnover, with some paying over the odds for new players and some guilty of letting stars go before their time.
Chelsea have done plenty of both, with the funds provided by Roman Abramovich perhaps changing the focus from homegrown talent to high-profile transfers. The new Todd Boehly era has struggled to change tack so far too.
The Chelsea academy is widely regarded as one of the very best in the country, but the competition for places in the first team and vagaries of identifying talent at young ages mean some players are bound to slip through the net.
Here Mirror Football looks at the most notable examples of players who have gone onto star elsewhere after being released by Chelsea. They will be hoping the 13 players they have released this summer don’t go on to big things.
Declan Rice
The only place to start: the most famous ‘what might have been?’ for Chelsea. Rice was released from Chelsea’s academy aged 14, crucially before he’d had a growth spurt.
Rice was deemed not strong enough for the top level. “I was like Bambi on ice – I was all over the place,” he later explained. “My body just wasn’t used to itself, so I wasn’t running properly.”
He was in the same age group as Reece James and Mason Mount, but unlike his peers he didn’t stay and blossom at Chelsea. Instead he was snapped up by West Ham, who are now on the brink of selling him to Arsenal for around £100million after he captained them to the Europa Conference League trophy.
Jamal Musiala
Musiala has emerged as one of the best young players in Europe over the past few seasons. He already has 31 goals and 23 assists in 125 appearances for Bayern Munich, as well as 22 caps for Germany at the age of 20.
His career could have been different, had he decided his future lay in England, rather than Germany. While he was born in Germany, he grew up in England and spent time in the Chelsea academy before deciding to leave south west London for Bavaria, aged 16. Musiala was not released by Chelsea, but rather chose a different path.
Dominic Solanke
Solanke was the star of the Chelsea academy during his time there and won the Chelsea academy player of the year award for the 2014/15 season. The young striker scored bags of goals for the youth sides, signed a professional contract with the club and looked set for a bright future in a blue shirt.
Like many of his era, Solanke was sent on loan to Vitesse, where he scored a respectable seven goals in 25 games. He returned and was part of the first-team squad for the 2016/17 season, yet made just one senior appearance for his boyhood club.
He joined Liverpool on a free transfer upon the expiry of his contract and has since found a home at Bournemouth, where he has 56 goals in 174 games.
Eddie Nketiah
Nketiah grew up supporting Arsenal, but joined Chelsea after they scouted him at the age of nine. He spent seven years in the academy, but was released in 2015. The Times reported that Chelsea deemed him to be too small.
“I don’t know what happened at Chelsea,” Arsene Wenger said. “He has scored goals at youth level and sometimes I don’t know why they let him go. You see that more and more. Young people travel from one club to another.”
Nketiah is now a part of the Arsenal first team and has 32 goals in 131 appearances altogether. He is a useful back-up striker for Mikel Arteta, but has not established himself in the side, with Gabriel Jesus preferred up front.
Tariq Lamptey
In January 2020, Lamptey left Chelsea to join Brighton on a three-and-a-half-year contract. The move came after three first-team appearances for the Blues and was a surprise to the club.
Goal reports that the club was ‘furious’ to lose a prized homegrown talent and had expected him to sign a new contract. Lamptey had been with Chelsea since the age of seven, but he chose to leave, in part because Reece James was blocking his path.
Despite struggling with injuries, Lamptey has made 77 appearances for the Seagulls and embellished his reputation.
Willian
A very different case to those above. Willian made 339 appearances for Chelsea over seven years, scoring 63 goals and contributing 62 assists to help win five significant trophies.
He left in the summer of 2020 after Chelsea allowed his contract to expire. He was 32 years old and there was a feeling his best days might be behind him when he subsequently joined Arsenal.
It was not at the Emirates Stadium where the Brazilian winger made Chelsea think twice, but at Fulham, who he joined last September. Five goals and six assists last season was a fine return for a veteran player, who produced much more than some of Chelsea’s expensive new arrivals.
