Chelsea, Atletico Madrid sort out Filipe Luis's future -- reports

Well, I think it's safe to say that it's going down.  Filipe Luis Kasmirski will be returning to Atletico Madrid after just a year at Chelsea.  While the left back never once claimed to be unhappy, he'd most likely prefer to play more often than he did last season.  That's probably a safe assumption to make, especially when there's nothing else tying him to the club, the city, or the league.

The big question right now becomes just what sort of deal we managed to eke out for the underutilized (underperforming?) left back.  He arrived on the backs of several excellent seasons at Atletico for a fairly princely sum of €20-22m (£15.8m at last year's exchange rates), which, combined with just a three-year deal made him one of the most expensive players in the squad.  But he could not unseat either Cesar Azpilicueta or Branislav Ivanovic, and thus made just 20 starts and only 9 in the Premier League.

Earlier reports had us loaning him back to Atletico, but fortunately that seems to have turned to be a bunch of nonsense.  Marca were one of the firsts to claim a permanent transfer, with a fee of €16m.  Later reports from the likes Sky (£15m) and The Guardian (£16m) claim higher values, ones which would basically equal the fee that we paid last year.  We never expected the soon-to-be 30-year-old to have any significant resale value after last summer, so any of those prices quoted would represent a good deal.  Sure, he was expensive while he was here, but there's nothing we can do about that now.

Obviously, none of this is official just yet.  Sounds like it will be very soon however, and that means we will need to dip back into the transfer market.  As mentioned before, Augsburg's Baba Rahman has been the only full back with whom we've been linked with any degree of seriousness, but last we heard, he was close to switching to AS Roma instead.  We would have to make a pretty strong push to get back in, and that would include a transfer fee close to, if not more than we would receive for Filipe Luis.  The Standard, for example, claims at least £14m would be needed.  The Guardian are running with £17m, which is pretty close to what earlier reports claimed Augsburg were holding out for (€25m).

Either way, we would definitely be buying.