Todd Boehly's summer has been anything but relaxing. He won't have see much of London outside of the Stamford Bridge offices and he is all but living out of a suitcase as he sprints across Europe to start, continue, and tie up transfer negotiations for incoming and outgoing players.
It's the life of a sporting director being done by a man that has spent the first four months of the year attempting to buy the club in the first place. So far, he's done a very respectable job in building new contacts and putting himself into a fresh industry, it's worked as well as it could have.
Deals for Raheem Sterling and Kalidou Koulibaly are the rewards for the hard work. Missed opportunities for Ousmane Dembele, Matthijs De Ligt, Robert Lewandowski and Raphinha will make the two completed transfers taste sweeter but also prove the point that this is a specialist role and Boehly isn't a specialist.
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The interest that Chelsea have so far held has been genuine, if not always completely confident, and in most of the cases there has been little chance that the Blues have really missed. Players have taken their own decisions and forced them into transfer situations in the cases of Raphina, De Ligt, Lewandowski and Dembele. Chelsea tried and came second.
However, by being tied up in attempts to recruit Jules Kounde for large periods of the past 12 months, a deal which may still come through, there is a sense of distraction to the deal. A move for the Frenchman has been on, off, and back on again, and that's just this week. It has seen concern arise over the future of Levi Colwill as the youngster is left in a state of limbo as to where he will be in the pecking order should one, or two, more centre-backs still come through the door.
Not managing to secure a deal for Nathan Ake has been good in that Chelsea didn't move to a price they weren't prepared to pay, but the length of time spent on him might have been better spent elsewhere. Again, largely this has been out of the club's control, and even in a move for Gleison Bremer to Juventus it's tough to be critical of Chelsea as the player was desperate to stay in Italy.
So to with Lens right-back Jonathan Clauss, who looks to have secured a cross-league transfer to fellow Ligue 1 side Marseille. Although Chelsea did hold interest in the player and thought him a good back-up option for Reece James at wing-back, he didn't want to be to behind someone as established as the Englishman.
To this extent it is understandable that Chelsea have made certain decisions to go and not to go for players and the extent to which they actively pursue targets or push negotiations, however, when the window ends there is a chance that they look back and wish for another chance to go after their options with more force.
On a similar note, Chelsea have been strung up on working with Barcelona to finalise a way for Marcos Alonso and Cesar Azpilicueta to move to Spain. Given the need and desire for other outer squad players to be cashed in on, if time runs out for Ross Barkley, Hakim Ziyech or Timo Werner to leave Tuchel's squad, then it once again could be that time was better spent elsewhere.
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