Christopher Nkunku was one of those players who looked destined for a Premier League move some time before a transfer actually materialized. Liverpool had been heavily linked, but he ended up at Chelsea, where he now serves as something of a cautionary tale.
The switch to Anfield would have made a great deal of sense. At the time when Nkunku joined Chelsea, Roberto Firmino was just leaving Liverpool, and the Frenchman offered many of the same attributes.
But by this point, Jurgen Klopp had already signed Darwin Nunez, with the idea of making him the focal point of the attack for years to come. Had a move to Liverpool been on the cards for Nkunku, it might have had to be during the previous summer.
Yet Chelsea seemed to have no such qualms about signing multiple players for the same position. Nicolas Jackson and Deivid Washington arrived in the same summer as Nkunku, a year on from the transfer of David Datro Fofana.
Since then, Joao Felix and Marc Guiu have arrived as well. That’s not to mention any number of flexible attackers, including Jadon Sancho, Pedro Neto, and of course Cole Palmer.
It is simply not possible to think that Chelsea ever had a coherent plan for how these forwards would function in the team. Between them, the attackers signed in the past two summers alone make up almost an entire XI on their own.
The model appears to be to throw enough mud to make sure that something sticks. And if Palmer is a vindication of that strategy, just about everyone else is an indictment of it — Nkunku included.
Chelsea is now expected to sell the 27-year-old in the summer. As part of their due diligence, his agents have reached out to clubs including Liverpool, per TeamTalk.
But it’s not a conversation that is likely to have ended positively for Nkunku. When he was first linked with Liverpool, he was a bundle of exciting potential — now he is coming toward the end of his peak window, having done nothing but drift for the past two seasons.
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Of course, even the best-laid plans don’t always work out. After all, Liverpool is being approached because it is indeed in the market for a striker, with the Nunez experiment seemingly set to be written off at last.
But Chelsea is making player stagnation the rule as opposed to the exception. Nkunku still has good underlying numbers from the minutes he has played — you could almost say Firmino-esque — but his bruising experience at Chelsea has significantly harmed his future prospects.
For one thing, clubs will be wary of effectively letting Chelsea off the hook. Its whole strategy is based around the idea that its players will still have resale value if things don’t work out, and it is galling to justify that logic and help to prevent a catastrophic black hole in the Stamford Bridge finances.
Likewise, two years on the periphery will have done him no good whatsoever. Arsenal has already been Chelsea’s useful fool once in the case of Raheem Sterling, and Liverpool will have no desire to fulfil the same role.
(Image: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
Then there’s the question of whether Chelsea even wants to let Nkunku go. Unless he can bank the club an accounting profit on the books, he might find himself stuck.
Nkunku is one of the luckier ones in this regard, having “only” signed a six-year contract when he joined. But that was before the Premier League limited the amortization of transfer fees to five years, so he will still have four-sixths (two-thirds) of his transfer fee outstanding from an accounting perspective.
That’s around $46 million. Given his age now and his recent lack of any real opportunity to shine, it’s far from a given that any suitors would bid this much — Chelsea might find itself relying on Saudi Arabia for a bailout, or else having to consider loan options for the striker.
The entire Chelsea transfer setup is a nightmare for any prospective signings: the sheer quantity of new arrivals minimizes each individual’s chances of thriving, and those who do not succeed are at very real risk of being trapped in the system. Even those who do succeed might well feel trapped, with the Blues at real risk of missing out on the Champions League for the third season running.
Even if Nkunku does get out this summer, either on loan or permanently, his options have been slashed dramatically compared to where he was before making the move. A big club might take a risk on him, but he will be arriving as a squad player, risking a further extension of his purgatorial stay on the fringes.
It begs the question of why any promising player would sign their futures away to Chelsea at the current moment in time. Nkunku will join in with a guard of honor for Liverpool at the weekend, along with the likes of Moises Caicedo and Romeo Lavia, and that will speak volumes symbolically.
A strategy reliant on attracting the best young talent can only survive when that talent is nurtured. Nkunku’s agent won’t be the only one begging Liverpool for a route out, and the harsh answer should be a lesson to anyone that has Chelsea knocking on their door this summer.
