Chelsea ready to sanction Patrick Bamford sale with buy-back option

Young Patrick Bamford may have impressed in the recent training ground friendly played against QPR reserves, but it's doubtful that his immediate future is to remain with the club.  Having already played for Crystal Palace this season, he can only play competitively for one other team, and that probably won't be Chelsea.  Who will it be?  That's a bit less clear, though if reports are to be believed, he still has plenty of suitors despite the wasted and useless six months at Palace.

The latest team linked with the 22-year-old is another Premier League club, Norwich City, who returned to the big time last season after a year in the Championship.  So claims the Mirror.

The interesting bit here is that the Canaries are apparently not as keen on borrowing Bamfordinho as they are on buying him outright, and apparently Chelsea are willing to acquiesce as long as we get to insert a buy-back clause.  Buy-back clauses are a hot topic suddenly*, but if Norwich do agree to such an arrangement, it makes perfect sense for Chelsea to agree as well.  It's like a loan, but better!

Norwich's strikers have combined for a grand total of 7 Premier League goals so far this season (Mbokani and Jerome leading the way with 3 each), so there's plenty of room for improvement.  They did sign Steven Naismith (who's not really a striker) from Everton while somehow extracting £8m from AFC Bournemouth for Lewis Grabban, so Bamford could conceivably have an opportunity to make an impact at first-team level.

* The Times, for example, are using it as the latest stick with which to beat the Chelsea front office — I'm not sure why that's a story now; we've always assumed that there was no buy-back clause for Lukaku, while there's a decent chance that we did have a small stake (10% or so) in De Bruyne's sale. Not that we're likely to know for sure either way.