FC Lorient take a chance on Tiémoué Bakayoko

Not strictly Chelsea-related (at least not anymore!), but our former midfielder and occasional footballer, Tiémoué Bakayoko has caught on with FC Lorient, having signed a two-year contract with the French Ligue 1 side.

Officially, the 29-year-old spent the last two seasons on loan from Chelsea at AC Milan, but in reality, he barely played as they didn’t want to trigger the obligatory transfer clause in his loan contract. He had tried to engineer moves away in the past two transfer windows, but without any success — it’s unclear just how hard he really tried, in retrospect — before his Chelsea contract was finally up at the end of the season and we released him.

Behold, the most quaint player-announcement video ever:

I have no idea what Lorient might be expecting from a player who’s barely played in two years and wasn’t exactly tearing up the pitch before then either, but perhaps it’s a low-risk high-reward investment for them. Their current head coach, Régis Le Bris, who was the long-time head of the famed Stade Rennais academy, worked with Bakayoko there at the U19 level.

Good luck, Timmy, we’ll always have that one most excellent song!