Football: Chelsea’s exciting new striker
It’s the transfer that has “got everyone in football talking”, said Simon Johnson on The Athletic. With
31 goals in all competitions for RB Leipzig this season, Timo Werner is one of the most coveted forwards in Europe. And last week, it was announced that Chelsea had agreed to sign the 24-year-old German for £54m. The Blues haven’t been title contenders since they won the league three years ago. But Frank Lampard, who became manager last summer, has “galvanised all the players and promoted academy talent” – and the club is now “looking forward to the future with great excitement”. Even in the current “Covid-19 altered” climate, Chelsea are getting Werner at an excellent price, said Andy Brassell in The Guardian.
He isn’t an out-and-out striker – he has a tendency to “drift to the left, Thierry Henry-style, and like Henry he has the pace to “blaze clear” of defenders. But the key thing is that Werner scores lots of goals, said James Gheerbrant in The Times. And young strikers aren’t exactly “growing on trees at the moment”: of the 17 players who have scored 15 goals or more in Europe’s top five leagues this season, just four are under 25. “There simply aren’t many players like Werner entering their prime.”
What’s really notable about this deal is that Chelsea “consider themselves sufficiently solvent” to be forking out this kind of cash, said Sam Wallace in The Sunday Telegraph. It was only two months ago that they were talking to players about salary cuts. Now, “the low hum of investment that is everpresent in Premier League football” can be heard once again. We can’t expect an immediate return to the good old days: between the collapse in revenue from ticket receipts and uncertainty over coronavirus’s impact on the Champions League, most clubs are likely to spend conservatively this summer. But Chelsea’s signing of Werner makes it feel like “some semblance of normal has returned”.