Throughout Chelsea’s recent successful seasons at academy level, the first few matches haven’t always laid a marker for what was to come. The odd hiccup early in the campaign has been a bit of a common feature and so, for Ed Brand’s latest crop of youngsters to come out of their first three matches with nine points, including trips to Arsenal and Southampton, is a very encouraging sign for the…
The headlines will lead with news that Michy Batshuayi and Antonio Rüdiger guided Chelsea’s Development Squad to a 3-0 win over Liverpool on Monday night but, make no mistake about it, this was a confident and swashbuckling team performance that offered all manner of encouragement for the season to come. Certainly, having two seasoned pros in the ranks helped, and Batshuayi grabbed a brace, but there were also promising outings…
For the second week in a row, Conor Gallagher takes centre stage in the Loan Report, as he produced another decisive performance for a Charlton Athletic side already looking comfortable in the Championship. Headliners After scoring his first professional goal last weekend at home to Stoke, the reigning Academy Player of the Year was back at it this time around away to Barnsley. He struck his second goal of the…
The start of a new season is a typically exuberant time, full of excitement and possibility, before the grind of the ten months that follows begins to take effect. Thar wide-eyed wonder at what might be possible brings out both the best and worst in people and, in academy football, that typically means scintillating moments of promise mixed in with no little error. Throw in playing in front of Frank…
At any given time, Chelsea have a stunning array of individual talent running through the academy, but the collective is more powerful than any single player can ever be. We’re just two games into the new season as far as the Development Squad are concerned but, on the evidence to date, we’re looking at a group capable of mixing it with anyone. They might lack for numbers, and they’re going…
We’re off and running in the goals column in the 2019-20 Loan Army season with two to bring you since last weekend. We’ll get to Brazil in due course but, to start with, there was a very enjoyable home debut in South London for a midfielder making his first senior start. Headliners Such was the impression Conor Gallagher made in his cameo from the bench in Charlton’s win at Blackburn…
Time. A valuable commodity, a great healer, all powerful. Whatever way you look at it, time is as much of an influence over academy football as anything else and, as Chelsea kicked off their new Under-18 season with a 2-1 win at Arsenal, it came into focus once again. Five months ago, Andy Myers’ team essentially yielded their four-year stranglehold on the Under-18 South league title by losing 3-0 on…
What is Leasing.com anyway? The controversial Football League Trophy, with a new headline sponsor nobody seems to have heard of, returned on Tuesday night in sparsely-populated stadiums where teams of teenagers wearing numbers more closely associated with bingo than football take on senior pros who’d rather be just about anywhere else. Teams from the third and fourth tiers of the domestic game are compelled to play roughly one-third of their…
It’s that time again. The tenth season of the Loan Report gets under way here at TheChels.net and it promises to be no less exciting now than it has been over a decade that has seen Chelsea launch England’s most expansive programme of developing young talent both for performance and for profit. A wide-reaching and often controversial programme, it has been the source of criticism and inspiration, as a number…
Three months ago, the 2018-19 Chelsea academy season drew to an unusually subdued conclusion. The Development Squad claimed a hard-earned 2-1 win away to Brighton on a cool Friday night on the Sussex coast, just a week after the Under-18s had rounded off their campaign with a similar victory on their travels at Reading. There was no hoopla, there were no memorable celebrations and there was no silverware. For the…