After our latest demoralizing defeat, on Tuesday night, Chelsea Vice-captain Enzo Fernández stopped by the cameras of ESPN Argentina to answer a few questions. He talked about our own mistakes, about PSG’s quality, and about how we needed to regroup and support each other because there was still plenty left to fight for this season, including the FA Cup and a top-five finish in the league. Right words, right intentions from one of the team’s biggest leaders.
However, he seemed rather less committed
when when asked about his longer-term future at the club, giving it the classic “I don’t know, we’ll see” treatment. You can interpret those words (and body language) however you’d like, but they only served to increase the speculation that was already bubbling up (again) about what may lie ahead for the 25-year-old as he enters what are generally considered the prime years of a player’s career.
This is of course hardly the first time Enzo has been subject to such speculation, but the environment at the club right now seems more ripe for it than in the last couple years. The progress that’s been promised has not really materialized and though the market may be limited for a player of his valuation (and length of contract), the teams that have been linked before can certainly afford to pay up.
On Thursday, it was Liam Rosenior’s turn to step in front of some microphones, and he moved to dissuade any notion of Enzo not being happy and fully committed. One would expect nothing different from a head coach in this situation, but there’s also no reason to think that his positive spin is baseless.
“I think I had a great conversation with Enzo at length this morning before training, not just about his comments, just how he was feeling, how as a team we can improve. He’s one of the captains of the club. What I would say is that he made it really, really clear to me how happy he is here at this club, how much he wants to win, how passionate he is for us to be successful. And he also said that in translation and in emotion, things get misconstrued in what he said. So for me, he’s fully committed to this group, he’s fully committed to winning here at this football club.”
-Liam Rosenior; source: Football.London
This lost in translation angle has been briefed by the club to various journalists as well, and again, one would expect nothing less. For me, that interpretation is a lot less likely than Enzo actually considering his future (especially in a not exactly rare moment of frustration and abject disappointment) and not knowing what it might hold in six months — but things also can change so quickly in football that it’s hard to be truly certain of anything beyond just a few months.
Many things can be true — and usually are true — but at the end of the day, Enzo’s future certainly seems less “guaranteed” now than, say, at the start of the season. (Much like the team’s prospects seem far less bright than nine months ago.)
One final angle to all this is the contract negotiation angle, and I suppose there may be some truth in that as well, with the club previously reported to be looking into extensions for the likes of Moisés Caicedo and Marc Cucurella, and having already announced one just last week for Reece James. Fabrizio Romano claims that talks with Enzo have also been going on “for months” without an agreement.
