Chelsea end farcical summer with loan with impossible buy option close to €20m

Chelsea last night completed the loan of David Datro Fofana to Goztepe, ending a rather painful saga of trying to find the former Molde man a club to play at this season.

According to Fabrizio Romano, the deal has a recall clause in January and a buy option to make the deal permanent. There’s no reporting on the value of that clause, but we paid €10m for him and apparently wanted €20m this summer, so we’d imagine it’s somewhere in between those two figures. Either way, it looks too much for Goztepe to realistically pay, given it would be a record for Turkish football.

The recall which Fabrizio mentions is interesting. It’s apparently active from the 1st of January. We waited around so long to find Fofana a club that’s it’s already mid-September, so it could end up being less than four months for Fofana in Turkey. When European windows open up in January, we’d imagine Chelsea would prefer to move him on to one of the bigger leagues.

Fofana lost in the chaos of Chelsea’s summer

It ended up being quite the summer for Fofana. He was totally lost in the mix as we pursued all sorts of other targets, and it was only when the window was almost closed that we seemed to suddenly remember we had him locked in a cupboard somewhere.

That was followed by a long period where we tried to flog him to AEK Athens before the Greek window closed, with no success. This move to Turkey has only come about because this was the last window in Europe still open.

Another asset has been terribly managed, and will surely not be happy with the way he’s been handled by Chelsea since he arrived at the club. There has never been a clear plan for him, and he’s really watched two prime years of his career wasted already.