CHELSEA face an uphill battle to offload outcast Ben Chilwell.
The England left-back, 28, earns about £190,000 a week and will not take a pay cut just to make it easy for boss Enzo Maresca to get him out.
The Blues may end up having to hand their Champions League winner a huge severance deal or heavily subsidise a loan to another Prem club.
Chilwell has not played a single minute of top-flight football this season and was part of the ‘bomb squad’ told last summer that they have no future at the club under Maresca.
Chelsea have until February 3 to get Chilwell and others off the books in the winter transfer window.
That includes £20million midfielder Carney Chukwuemeka who has started only one game since August 2023 but still has 3½ years left on his contract.
Chilwell is frustrated at his lack of first-team action and unhappy at being so far down the pecking order.
He has played only one half of one match this season – a 45-minute appearance as a second half sub against Barrow in the Carabao Cup back in September.
Chilwell was not even registered for the club’s Conference League squad for the group stages.
Maresca previously said he has sympathy with the likes of out of favour Chilwell but he does not plan to change his stance.
FOOTBALL FREE BETS AND SIGN UP DEALS
The Italian said: “There are players that unfortunately they didn’t play a lot with us in all the competitions, like Chilwell, like Carney.
“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.”
But it will not be easy persuading the England Euro 2020 finalist to accept a pay reduction in order to quit Stamford Bridge.
Chilwell joined Chelsea from Leicester in a £50million deal back in August 2020.
The full-back has since amassed a total of nine goals and 12 assists in 107 appearances.
Chilwell has also won the Champions League as well as the Uefa Super Cup with the Blues in 2021.
Chelsea are currently paying more than £200,000 of Raheem Sterling‘s £300,000-a-week wages while he is on loan at Prem rivals Arsenal.
CHELSEA know only too well how there is no time for settling in new players during the January transfer window.
The ink had barely dried on a then-British-record £107million deal for Enzo Fernandez before he was kitted out in blue and playing 90 minutes on his debut against Fulham in February 2023.
It was precisely a week after the midfielder’s swansong for Benfica and less than two months since winning the World Cup with Argentina in Qatar.
New year signings have to hit the ground running. It was the same first time around for forward Joao Felix and for winger Mykhailo Mudryk.
Which is where the forthcoming attempt to get defender Ben Chilwell out of Chelsea this month hits a major snag.
The latest transfer window has just been thrown open and managers in need of a quick fix are scouring the scouting databases to see who can save their season.
Chilwell, 28, has played just 45 minutes of first-team football this season — as a second-half sub in a one-sided Carabao Cup victory over League Two Barrow on September 24.
Since then he has made the bench once — in the next round when Chelsea got knocked out. And that’s it.
Not a single minute of Premier League action, with the first half of the season gone.
It is fair to say that a player with more than 200 senior games behind him is rustier than the wreck of the Titanic stuck more than two miles down in the North Atlantic since 1912.
Among the many items demanding the attention of new England manager Thomas Tuchel, who started his reign yesterday, Chilwell’s predicament must be one of the most confusing.
After all the German, when manager at Stamford Bridge, felt confident enough in his ability to play his attacking left-sider for the shock victory over Manchester City in the Champions League final of 2021.
Three-and-a-half years later and he might need help from the police to find his one-time first- choice full-back.
On paper, Chilwell looks just the player to bolster any Premier League squad wishing to add pace and experience to its defence.
For the likes of Ipswich, Wolves, Southampton, right up to Manchester United — currently missing Luke Shaw — he would be the perfect off-the-shelf cover man. There is no doubting his quality.
In the fickle world of football, a player with 21 international caps is considered unsuitable by Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca — and in this business that’s fair enough.
But trying to market one of the most high-profile casualties of Maresca’s so-called ‘bomb squad’ is not going to be easy when it is hard to find even a photo of him in Blues kit from the past half a year.
Chelsea may well end up following a similar path to that which managed to secure forward Raheem Sterling a last-minute release from mothballs at Stamford Bridge and a loan deal to Arsenal.
More than two-thirds of Sterling’s £300,000-a-week wages are still being paid by his parent club.
Chilwell — bought in 2020 from Leicester, where he came through the youth ranks — does not earn as much as Sterling. He picks up about
£190,000 a week, which is still a hefty sum.
But after six months in the doldrums, potential suitors will drive an extremely hard bargain to take a punt on an undoubted top-class footballer.
However, he is one who may need his boiler warmed up like an old locomotive before getting up to full steam.
In an ideal world, Chilwell would leave permanently this month. He is surely unhappy not playing and Chelsea would like to get him off the payroll and recoup some cash in the shape of a transfer fee.
But that too could be complicated. With the player under contract until 2027, he could choose to perch in the stands and sit tight for the next two and a half years — earning nearly £25m in the process.
That is unlikely. But the option is there to stick it out in the way fellow left-back Wayne Bridge did at Manchester City for four years after being frozen out.
