Chilwell refuses to take a pay cut with the Blues unable to move £190k a week | All Football

Chelsea may have to get creative in offloading Ben Chilwell this month, with the defender refusing to take a pay cut to leave the club.

Chilwell joined Chelsea in a £50million move from Leicester in 2020 and still has two-and-a-half years left on his £190,000-a-week contract. He has been frozen out of the first team by Enzo Maresca, who has made it clear that he has no future at Stamford Bridge.

The left-back was left out of the squad for the Conference League – a competition where Chelsea have given minutes to their fringe players – and his only appearance of the season was 45 minutes in a 5-0 Cup win. Carabao over Barrow.

The 28-year-old is frustrated by a lack of game time but is equally reluctant to give up his lucrative contract to help the club that gave him. The Sun therefore reports that Chelsea may need to pay Chilwell with a severance package, or arrange a heavily subsidized loan deal to move him to another club in the January transfer window.

He is one of five players earmarked for a move this month, along with Carney Chukwuemeka, Cesare Casadei, Harvey Vale and Alex Matos. Chukwuemeka cost Chelsea £20m from Aston Villa in 2022, but has barely featured, with Maresca keen to work with a select group of players.

“There are players who unfortunately didn’t play much with us in all the competitions, like Chilwell, like Carney,” the Chelsea manager explained recently. “They are probably the first to want to leave because they work every day, they train every day, they want to play games – and if they don’t play games they think leave

“So we’re going to see if some of them come knocking on the door and say I want to leave. For every player it’s a different situation.”

Chilwell made just 13 Premier League appearances last season due to hamstring and knee problems – factors which added to the difficulty of finding a buyer over the summer after he missed out on England selection. for Euro 2024. With the defender short of game time, those difficulties will continue in January, despite previous interest from Manchester United.

He was previously part of Chelsea’s ‘bomb squad’ who were forced to train away from the main group in an effort to progress. Speaking in September, Maresca explained: “We are going to sit with him and find a solution because he is the only one. He’s probably going to be back with us in a training session, we’ll see, because at the moment he’s not training with us.”

When asked if Chilwell could rejoin the group, he added: “The reason why he’s training separately is because the idea was that he left but because he didn’t find a solution, I guess he’s going to start training with us. .”