Chelsea should move heaven and earth to keep Levi Colwill amid Arsenal and Liverpool interest

Regardless of whether Chelsea can be said to be the greatest side in the last 15 years of English football, as Mauricio Pochettino claimed last week, there has always been one thing the club was simply bad at, even when they were winning Champions League trophies – holding onto their best young talent.

During the reign of Roman Abramovic, the plan with the young players was simple – buy cheap and sell for a profit as soon as possible. Players were farmed out on loan, to Vitesse and elsewhere, en masse or were simply put in one side of a revolving door and sent out of the other. Mohamed Salah and Kevin de Bruyne came and went, sold at a profit having barely been given a chance to show what they could do at Stamford Bridge – successful deals, by the standards of the system, but obvious failures in the long run.

Other players simply rotted away in the loan system. Players like Josh McEachran and Lucas Piazon, both hailed as huge talents at one stage, regressed as they were shipped out to club after club. Baba Rahman has just left Chelsea for Greek side PAOK after an eight-year spell during which he made 15 Premier League appearances and endured seven loan spells. It was a cold, calculated and uncaring system that chewed up and spat out many players who could easily have gone on to bigger things in a more sympathetic environment.

Things have improved to a degree over the years – even if the case of Rahman makes it eminently clear that things are far from perfect – and there have been recent successes in the form of Reece James and Mason Mount, even if the latter has now left the club. And now Chelsea face a fresh test of their capacity to retain and develop their best youngster, as Levi Colwill becomes the subject of intense transfer interest.

The centre-back impressed during the back end of last season on loan at Brighton & Hove Albion, and was arguably England’s best player as the Under-21s won the European Championships without conceding a single goal. At 20 years of age he has the control, composure and confidence of a man with ten more years of top-level football in his legs, and has the technique and vision to look like one of the best ball-playing defensive prospects in the country. Not for nothing did Gareth Southgate invite Colwill to train with the England squad ahead of the recent Euro 2024 qualifiers against Malta and North Macedonia.

Colwill’s rise has been swift, and his relatively stingy contract reflects that. He is currently on £5,000 per week with a deal that lasts until 2025 – a deal that he wants to improve upon, understandably. But the player has made it clear that his real priority is first-team football, and with Brighton keen on securing a permanent deal and Arsenal and Liverpool allegedly waiting in the wings, he will have options that could turn his head. This is a crucial summer for the player and for Chelsea, who must decide whether to sell him or trust him to become the player he looks born to be.

On the one hand, Chelsea’s low ebb and the summer refit that has resulted means there is more space for him than there might otherwise have been. Kalidou Koulibaly and Cesar Azpilicueta are gone and Thiago Silva is only getting older. There is a chance for a gifted young player to bully his way into the starting eleven, even with Wesley Fofana and Benoît Badiashile also in the mix.

On the flip side of the coin, the absence of European competition occasioned by their disastrous 2022/23 campaign means that Chelsea have fewer fixtures to play, and thus fewer minutes to share around. Balancing the needs of a large squad without Champions League football will be a tricky tightrope to walk, and some players are likely to be left in the cold. Colwill has made it eminently clear that he will not tolerate being one of them.

All the signs suggest that, if they give Colwill the new contract and senior playing time he wants – and probably deserves – then he will blossom into a hugely effective player and a potential future lynchpin of the team, but then Chelsea haven’t always been the best at identifying when that would be the case. This is a new regime, of course, but there are no indications that man management of young players has improved yet. If Colwill is casting glances elsewhere based on historical precedent, it would be hard to blame him.

Of course, Colwill is not yet the finished article, and Chelsea’s immense transfer spending means that they simply cannot risk being stuck too far from the top four for too long. Giving minutes to relatively unproven players is a risk that may be impossible to countenance – and perhaps it would be tough to blame Todd Boehly and Mauricio Pochettino if they took that view as well. Nevertheless, if they are thinking about the long term (as Boehly so often insisted was the case last season) then throwing away a player like Colwill, and losing him to a potential rival for continental qualification into the bargain, should not be countenanced.

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Colwill is a hugely gifted player whose performances last season and over the summer eclipsed those of the majority of Chelsea’s more seasoned pros. If they want to get the ship pointing back in the correct direction – and if they want to keep it sailing straight for the long haul – then they need to start finding a way to put some faith in their youth. It’s hard to think of a better place to start than Levi Colwill.