Chelsea-bound Danny Drinkwater hands in official transfer request at Leicester City — report

With less than 48 hours to go in the transfer window, things are moving right along to get a couple signings in before the deadline.

While you never truly know what’s happening behind the scenes, one of the most likely to happen before 11pm on Thursday rolls around is the signing of Danny Drinkwater from Leicester City. The two teams have been locked in negotiations for a while, and looked to be quite far apart in terms of valuation — them wanting £40m but Chelsea only offering £15m, then £25m — but there’s been plenty of reported progress recently around the £30m price point.

Now here’s Sky Sports to claim that the 27-year-old midfielder has handed-in a transfer request at Leicester, thus foregoing any potential loyalty bonuses he may be due and greasing the wheels for his own transfer out of the club.

Sky were in the middle of their silly American-style hot takes program ‘The Debate’ when the news broke, so we were treated to some low-level analysis from Jamie Redknapp, which you can watch in this video.

A few stray reports yesterday claimed that Drinkwater could be announced as early as tonight, but that looks to not be happening just yet.

Last year, most of Chelsea’s deadline day action occurred on the penultimate day, and we’re set to repeat that again this year with Drinkwater and Oxlade-Chamberlain and maybe Llorente and perhaps Barkley as well. But no Alexis because that much fun would be illegal.