Andrey Santos has completed his £50m move to Manchester United, which was agreed last week. The 22-year-old midfielder has signed a five-year contract at Old Trafford.
There’s been a rather visceral reaction to this transfer, but at the end of the day, Santos was third-choice in midfield at best, behind both Moisés Caicedo and Enzo Fernández. With Caicedo going nowhere anytime soon and Enzo now possibly staying as well, Santos’s desires for a more regular starting role were going to be hard fulfill
at the Bridge. (Not to mention, we have the likes of Roméo Lavia and Dário Essugo, too, who can certainly play at a high level as well …. if they can stay healthy. Valentín Barco is expected to join from RC Strasbourg as well.)
Of course, letting a potentially great player go to an in-league rival is never great, and that could certainly come back to bite us. And there’s certainly a feeling that the move to make Santos available had plenty to do with the club’s financial situation as well, which is wholly the result of poor choices made by those in charge of the club these days.
All that said, BlueCo will certainly look at Santos as a shining example of our transfer policy: a young player plucked out of the Brazilian second division, developing through the BlueCo system (which is still only just two clubs deep), becoming a first-team player at Chelsea (43 appearances last season; 47 all told), and then cashed in for significant profit a few years later. It’s not a trophy, but it will be marked as a win for the sporting directors.
Obviously, that’s not at all exciting for any one of us. But this is our reality right now.
In any case, farewell, Andrey. It was nice to see you develop and get to wear the Chelsea shirt. I wish you the best of luck personally, and zero luck professionally for your new team.
