The real reason top European clubs including Marseille and Stuttgart haven’t made interest in defender serious | OneFootball

We’ve had it confirmed that Renato Veiga’s loan deal to Juventus is done – we just await the official announcement now.

But that might not be the end of our dealings with the Italian giants. According to reports from CaughtOffside, there’s another Blue on their radar. In quite the opposite situation of Veiga (who was a recent arrival on small wages, playing regularly) we have Ben Chilwell (one of the longest serving at the club, on massive wages, not playing at all).

At this stage, Chelsea’s demands for their former key player are pretty low. They don’t have much leverage – just take him off our hands and pay his wages and we’ll be happy. CaughtOffside say we would accept as low as £20m for him. We wouldn’t be surprised if the final number was far, far lower even than that.

Veiga’s move uses up yet another loan slot, so Juventus would have to make a permanent offer. But given their serious injury issues at the back, nothing can be ruled out.

Many teams interested – but none of them making a move

Ben Chilwell with a Juventus logo. (Photo by Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

What’s curious is the reports of the other teams kicking the tyres on Chilwell – Wolves, Dortmund, Napoli, Stuttgart, Bournemouth, Milan and Marseille are all named as interested in that piece. Given how little concrete information there’s been about actual interest in him, we’d have to think these links are very loose indeed.

Despite the best efforts of our sporting directors since about July, there simply has been nothing substantial about Chilwell going anywhere as far as we can see. The rumours never stop, but they never get beyond the stage of teams having “interest.” His wages are clearly a huge obstacle that nobody has been able to get around yet.