The bold £80m Chelsea and Crystal Palace swap deal that will only leave one club happy

Chelsea and Crystal Palace may be run very differently and their objectives and methods in the transfer market certainly don’t overlap all that much, but they may have two things in common this summer – the need for a new central defender, and a mutual solution.

On the one hand, Chelsea want an upgrade on their back line and have made former academy graduate Marc Guéhi one of their primary targets, but need to spend big in several areas and may struggle to do so while remaining safely on the right side of the Premier League’s financial rules. On the other, Crystal Palace are grimly aware that Guéhi has just one year left on his contract at Selhurst Park and that they would do well to move him on while that’s still a profitable proposition. So, could a swap deal provide an answer to both teams’ problems?

The swap deal that would see Marc Guéhi move back to Stamford Bridge

A recent report from The Daily Mirror claims that Chelsea will propose a trade which sees both money and a player sent to Palace in exchange for their star defensive player - £50m plus Trevoh Chalobah, who spent the first half of the season on loan at Palace before being recalled.

Chelsea reportedly value Chalobah at around £30m, meaning that such a deal could represent a very fair (perhaps even generous) price for Palace. Chalobah’s performances during his brief spell at Selhurst Park drew warm reviews, and on the face of it, it sounds like the kind of move that would be benefit all parties.

From Chelsea’s perspective, it certainly does. Partly, that’s because it’s highly unlikely that such an arrangement would be manufactured as a ‘true’ swap deal, but rather something that saw both clubs purchasing from each other, in the vein of the deal which saw Odysseas Vlachodimos and Elliot Anderson trade places between Nottingham Forest and Newcastle last summer.

That would allow Chelsea to sell Chalobah as a home-grown asset, registered as pure profit on the PSR balance sheet – a set-up which would make it much, much easier to afford ameliorated payments for Guéhi and indeed for the new striker, winger and perhaps goalkeeper they plan to purchase.

And they would, of course, get an upgrade in defence. Guéhi has been a standout for the England side over the past two years and in the Premier League, has developed into one of the best defenders in the top flight in terms of his positional sense and capacity to read the game, and has the technical qualities to suit Enzo Maresca’s system, which wants the back line to offer a relatively aggressive, forward-thinking base of possession, something they have struggled to do consistently this season.

So from the perspective of Cheslea – and perhaps the players involved – a swap deal involving Guéhi and Chalobah makes a lot of sense, and would likely represent very decent business. But would it work out quite as well for Crystal Palace?

Why Crystal Palace could be the losers of a swap deal with Chelsea

At first blush, bringing Chalobah back and making a hefty profit on the sale of Guéhi looks like a win-win for Crystal Palace. After all, they’re going to need to reinforce their defence one way or the other, especially given the near certainty that Guéhi leaves.

OIiver Glasner can perhaps count himself fortunate that he hasn’t had more injury problems at the back. Despite playing a back three, Glasner has only had four centre-halves on the books since Chalobah went back to Chelsea, one of whom (Chadi Riad) has been injured nearly all season.

Against all odds, that lack of depth hasn’t bitten Palace too hard and they’ve been able to stay competitive and even improve quite considerably with just Guéhi, Chris Richards and Maxence Lacroix to lean on. Still, signing at least two new defenders this summer seems to be an urgent necessity, so why not bring Chalobah back?

Perhaps because although Chalobah is a very decent defender and performed admirably enough during his stint at Selhurst Park, he isn’t a natural fit for Glasner’s system, and wouldn’t offer many of the same qualities that Guéhi he does.

In losing Guéhi, Palace will be losing their best tackler (his enormous 69% tackle success rate is the club’s best of any player with more than 90 league minutes to their name) and their best positional defender, but also their best distributor of the ball – a skill of Guéhi’s that is, perhaps, broadly underappreciated.

To put what Guéhi does with the ball in perspective, this season so far he has averaged 349.1 yards of ‘progressive’ passing – that is, completed passes that get the ball either 10 yards downfield or into the opposing penalty area – per game. That’s an impressive quantity for a centre-half, and shows just how effectively he can get the ball from defence to midfield to start off counter-attacks or simply keep possession under pressure.

In short, Guéhi gives Glasner an extra dimension. He isn’t just a brilliant defender but gets play moving back towards the opposing goal extremely quickly and efficiently – a skill set which helps Glasner’s aggressive pressing system to work even better.

In losing Guéhi, Palace know that will be losing a player who can’t easily be replace one-for-one, much as was the case with Michael Olise last year – but it would seem logical to go for a player who has a similar profile, especially given that Lacroix and Richards (to a certain extent), while below the standards set by Guéhi, are still good progressive passers with impressive stats of their own.

Chalobah, meanwhile, isn’t quite that kind of defender. Where Guéhi runs at about 350 progressive passing yards per match, Lacroix just over 300 and Richards 220, Chalobah managed just 186 during his loan spell at Palace, at a relatively modest 79% completion rate.

Besides which, he’s a far weaker tackler (52.2% at Palace) than Guéhi, and it’s pretty hard to find a statistic at which Chalobah beats out his former Eagles team-mate. So the question is, given that Chalobah is a downgrade on Guéhi, would he also add limitations to Palace’s playing style as a whole?

While the numbers from his time at Palace generate a few concerns about how much impetus Palace would lose in possession by moving from Guéhi to Chalobah, there are at least some encouraging signs from his time back at Chelsea.

Chalobah’s progressive passing distance per game has shot up to nearly double, albeit over a small sample size which includes just five league starts at centre-back and which has seen him attempt twice as many total passes in the first place. But at least there are hints that – given the right encouragement from the coach or simply the right options up-field – Chalobah can develop his possession game and get closer to being the kind of defender that Palace will need once Guéhi has left.

In terms of raw value, Chalobah and £50m seems like a very fair price for Guéhi when the England man has just one year left on his deal – but Palace need to make sure that the defenders they bring in are capable of filling the hole left by Guéhi as far as possible.

That doesn’t just mean being a good defender, but being the kind of defender who is press-resistant and able to get possession moving downfield quickly. As this rather nerdy run of stats suggests, Guéhi is superb at doing that, while Chalobah has offered less proof that he can be that kind of player, for all his qualities. Palace should think carefully about what Chalobah can and can’t do before taking a deal like this, no matter how sensible it seems on paper.

So why has Chalobah apparently used the ball much better and with more impact at Chelsea than at Palace, despite playing in a system which should have encouraged him to widen his passing range and be more adventurous with his distribution? That’s the question Glasner and his transfer team will need to answer before determining whether to spend resources on bringing the defender back to Palace or to spend their cash elsewhere. Fortunately, they’ve got the first-hand experience of working with him to work it all out before they need to make a decision on Guéhi’s future.