LATEST! Sources: Chelsea's BIG to-do list these next 2 weeks, Sources: Lewis Hall, Marc Cucurella, & Ian Maatsen, My view on Hall being sold, Olise u-turn, Midfield dreams, West Ham preview, and more

The Chelsea FC Newsletter: Friday 18th August 2023!

Morning all,

We have reached the end of another crazy week covering Chelsea Football Club in the transfer market. We have seen some crazy stuff happen already from Tyler Adams basically doing a Chelsea medical before us changing our minds on signing him, to Liverpool forcing us to pay more for Moises Caicedo, to Chelsea activiating a release clause to sign a player and him then signing a new deal, and now us potentially selling a player we agreed a new 7-year-contract for just a week before!! Whatever your opinion is on all this, it’s certainly been a bit messy to say the very least. Some good chaos, and some bad chaos, but chaos all the same.

This isn’t all negative, far from it. We have done some amazing business this window and addressed our main Achilles heel that has been an issue for years. So lets begin with the positives here - my comment piece on how we have rebuilt our midfield dream this summer.

From VERY positive to VERY negative, it looks like the club have agreed to sell Lewis Hall to Newcastle. I had the drop on this story yesterday morning when nothing was agreed and Chelsea were pondering the offer. In this as well I gave my opinion on selling Hall, and I’m not happy about it and think it’s a ridiculous decision, as do the majority of the fan base. But I’ve tried to be as balanced as possible with my views on that here. I also have sourced news on the futures of both Marc Cucurella and Ian Maatsen in this, with Chelsea aiming for the two LB options to be Maatsen and Chilwell. Might not be as simple as that though due to mistakes made last summer, read the article for more!

Sorting out Hall’s future was one of many things on Chelsea’s long to-do list in these next two weeks before the transfer window ends. I have a BIG sourced article on what else they are planning and need to do before the deadline. New goalkeeper, new attacker/striker (more than one), and a mass set of outgoings and loan moves to sort out, and you can find all the latest news on all of that in here.

We also have a game to play on Sunday once again, amongst all the madness of the transfer window that is still going on and far from ideal as the manager and players try to prep for another game. I have a match preview here with my predicted line-up (Moises starts) and also asking you to pick your PREFERRED line-up!

Oh and as always, to get all the very latest Chelsea news and updates on all the above as they came in yesterday, as well as further sourced news from me, the live blog was up yesterday as always and was on fire. You can check in on all that here. Unfortunately in this there is news of yet another injury to Reece James. Also two new attacking targets linked by other sources and some big sourced updates on them from me!

Finally, I had Jai McIntosh do a test Podcast episode for us yesterday and it’s safe to say we now have a lead candidate based off reactions. So watch this space and if you haven’t listened yet make sure to check it out here.

That’s it from me for now, Luke Rushbrook will be running the blog for us today as usual from around 9am, so do join him there. Any info I get I’ll send to him today. Any info I get after that until Sunday, I’ll put out on the Substack App chat as always. Do make sure you download that and put notifications on for my posts!

Have a good weekend and COME ON CHELSEA!!!!

Peace, Si.