Chelsea outcast Hakim Ziyech has again been denied an exit from the Premier League giants after he failed his medical at Al-Nassr.
Ziyech has endured a dreadful time at Stamford Bridge since joining the Blues from Ajax and is keen to resurrect his career elsewhere. He had originally tried to leave in January, but Chelsea botched the paperwork in his move to PSG and it collapsed.
It has appeared for much of the summer as if he would be following team-mates N'Golo Kante, Edouard Mendy and Kalidou Koulibaly to the Saudi Pro League. Al-Nassr made the Moroccan a lucrative offer for him to join Cristiano Ronaldo at last season's runners-up.
But that deal now looks to be dead in the water after Ziyech failed his medical with the Knights of Najd, as first reported in Saudi. Ziyech had been expected to complete a £17million move to Saudi this summer. His failed medical means that move will now not happen, with Ziyech still stuck at Stamford Bridge.
The results of the tests came through on the same day Al-Nassr agreed a deal with Inter Milan for midfielder Marcelo Brozovic.
Ziyech will not be joining the Croatian at Al-Awwal Park though in what is his second failed exit in six months. That first failure came in January when Chelsea failed to complete the paperwork on his potential move to PSG before the deadline. That left the French champions furious, with Chelsea bosses coming under fire for the way they handled negotiations. PSG sporting director Luis Campos was particularly critical.
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He said: "We had the player with us, we had done everything. But as with all transfers, you need all three parties to work well. In this case it worked very well for Paris Saint-Germain, it also worked well with Ziyech.
"Unfortunately, it didn’t work well for the last party."
It has become painfully clear that Ziyech has not lived up to expectations since arriving at the Blues in a £37m deal from Ajax in 2020. He has scored just 14 goals since moving to London, even failing to find the net at all in the campaign just gone.
That has led to a growing belief that the attacker needs to leave Chelsea if he is to resurrect his career. Former Blues star Frank Leboeuf certainly thinks so, encouraging Ziyech to do just that back in March.
"Definitely Ziyech," he told ESPN when asked which players should leave the Blues this summer. "The guy is not happy, and he wants to work. Every time he plays for Morocco, he’s the best player in the world.
"Every time he plays for Chelsea, he feels sad and lost. So I wish him to go somewhere else where he can show to the world he’s still the Ziyech that we have seen when he played for Ajax."
