Charly Musonda set to return to full-team training; George McEachran leaves MVV Maastricht

According to reports from HLN and Goal, Charly Musonda is set to return to full-team training with Chelsea’s development side. Musonda, who suffered a knee injury while on loan at Vitesse Arnhem last season, had been missing from action for the past 15 months.

He has been plagued by multiple injuries in the past few seasons and has made just 4 senior-team appearances since the start of the 2018/19 season with his last appearance coming in August 2019. A few months back, he talked about the ‘insurmountable mountain’ that he has to climb everyday just to play football once again.

He has been doing solo ball-work in the past few weeks, and Chelsea are hopeful that he can start making appearances for the U-23 side in the next week or two. A loan move in January however seems unlikely, since Musonda will not have returned to full fitness by then.

His current Chelsea contract expires in 2022, with the Blues unlikely to extend his contract and send him out on loan again in the summer due to FIFA’s new loan limits coming into place from the 2021/22 season onwards, and he will in all likelihood, depart permanently next summer.

At this point however, the focus needs to be on his recovery as he bids to regain a modicum of the form that made him so lethal at one point.

In other loanee news, 20-year-old midfielder, George McEachran, who joined MVV Maastricht in the first week of October for a full season, has returned to Chelsea after making just 3 appearances for the Dutch second-division side, due to undisclosed “compelling private reasons”. He will probably head out on loan once again in January with his current Chelsea contract expiring in 2022.