Chelsea manager Thomas Tuchel admitted that he had plans for Tino Livramento, but the club eventually had to sell the young fullback last summer.
After Mason Mount and Reece James’ meteoric rises in the Premier League, the Blues surprisingly lost a few of their best academy talents in the last summer transfer window.
One of them, Marc Guehi, who joined Crystal Palace, will likely start against Chelsea in Sunday’s FA Cup semifinal.
Losing top academy talents, especially for relatively low prices, might have frustrated some Chelsea fans, but Tuchel insisted that at the time, those were the “right” decisions.
“It is a decision we took together, and we’re happy about these decisions,” the manager said in Friday’s press conference on whether Chelsea would regret losing several academy talents last summer.
“You cannot go back and reflect because, at [that] point when we made the decisions, it was the right thing to do.
“For Tino Livramento, for example, we had a plan and we [would] have preferred a loan, but he saw his future [differently and decided] to go.
“The situation was then it was better to agree to a sale.
“For Marc [Guehi], it’s a fantastic development [at Crystal Palace]. It’s very hard or maybe even impossible to say now if we had kept him, he would have been better, worse, or the same.
“Maybe he needed exactly that, a change of environment, a bigger role, and more minutes to develop his full potential.”
Unlike Lewis Bate’s move to Leeds United, it was pretty easy to see why both Livramento and Guehi decided to pursue permanent moves to Southampton and Crystal Palace, respectively.
They were clearly offered regular first-team roles in the team which Chelsea could not guarantee.
In Livramento’s case, Chelsea had already had Reece James, who looked set to be the first-choice right-back for years to come, as well.
Conor Gallagher and Armando Broja may eventually prove that choosing the loan option can result in their earning their first-team spots at Chelsea, but in fairness, they are rather exceptions rather than the norm.
A lack of continuity that often comes with having to spend years on loan at different clubs is something that many young Chelsea talents have had to face over the years, and prior to Frank Lampard’s tenure, there were very few successful cases.
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