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Every defender listed
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Chelsea’s remarkable summer spending spree looks set to continue with the club nearing a completed deal for Ajax defender Jorrel Hato. The young talent, once heavily linked with a move to Arsenal, is reportedly on the cusp of making the move to Stamford Bridge, according to Fabrizio Romano. The transfer guru believes that negotiations are approaching the final stages and that the player should complete a move for around €40 million in the coming days.
Hato undoubtedly makes the move to the Premier League as an exciting young talent with plenty to offer his new club, but fans of the London club would be forgiven for not getting too excited just yet about the new signing. For even though Hato seems to possess all the qualities necessary to succeed in the English top-flight, he joins a club that has made a habit of spending a remarkable sum of money on defensive players in the last few years. And very few of them have actually worked out for Chelsea or their series of managers.
Indeed, as the table above shows, Hato would make the move to Chelsea as the club’s eleventh defensive signing in the last four seasons. At €40m, he certainly won’t arrive at Stamford Bridge with the same demands of players like Wesley Fofana or Marc Cucurella, who cost €80.4m and €65.3m respectively, but he nonetheless joins a growing list of players that have largely struggled to make the grade at the English club.
Such has been Chelsea’s struggles with defensive recruits that should Hato join for the reported fee of €40m, it would take the club’s spending on defensive players since the summer of 2022 to a remarkable €395.2m. In that period of time, no other club in European football has come close to spending that amount of money on defenders, with the next highest spender being Tottenham Hotspur on just €238.8m. Whether Hato can avoid a similar fate remains to be seen, but it certainly seems unlikely that he’ll be the last defender that Chelsea sign this season.
