Chalobah’s cut-rate transfer from Chelsea to Watford does include a buy-back clause — report

Ladies and gentlemen, time to put down your pitchforks and flamethrowers. While Nathaniel Chalobah is gone and there is nothing we can do about that, according to Simon Johnson of the Evening Standard, Chelsea DO have a buy-back clause (as well as a sell-on clause, but nobody really cares about that and some of that is FIFA-mandated anyway as a training/development fee already).

So it’s bye-bye Chalobah.

And it could be buy-back Chalobah.

Weeee.

That said ... and however ... and a big BUT ... this information does conflict with just about everything we heard earlier. The transfer fee does not — it was £5m, the Mail reported £6m, now we’re splitting the difference at £5.5m — but the lack of a buy-back was reported pretty consistently. Up until now.

I suppose the only way we’ll really find out is if (when?) Chalobah becomes as good as Matić was in 2014 and we attempt to buy him back. If we get a deal like we got on Matić, we will have known that back in 2017, somebody did something right in the negotiations for his sale.

If not ... well, let’s worry about that later.