Chelsea intend to sign Andy Carroll on permanent transfer from West Ham — report

Chelsea’s rumored interest in Andy Carroll isn’t going away. In fact, it’s doing quite the opposite, and escalating from mild interest to a potential loan move to, now, a potential permanent transfer. That’s the story from Sky Sports’ Kaveh Solkehol, who claims that “Chelsea have made contact with West Ham with the intent of signing Andy Carroll on a permanent deal”.

The first bit of the sentence probably isn’t new information, but the latter certainly is. Chelsea’s previously rumored intention was to bring in Carroll on a short-term loan and then address the striker situation for real in the summer. That’s not exactly inspiring, but it made some sense in accentuating the one consistently successful method of attack for Chelsea this season (i.e. heading the ball).

Spending anything measurable beyond a loan fee and wages on Carroll was generally agreed to be the heights of silliness, but apparently that’s where we’re at.

And it gets worse, since West Ham are apparently standing pat on their demand for Chelsea to pay full price for the 29-year-old, which amounts to an absurd £35m. Michy Batshuayi could possibly move in the opposite direction (on loan? permanently?) to lower that demand, but I’m not sure that sweetens the deal for us; plus Michy has supposedly already agreed terms with Sevilla pending a replacement.

Stay tuned, I suppose, and hope for something non-tragic to happen.

UPDATE: Matt Law is also running with the same story in the Telegrah.