£50m center back to Chelsea teased as Bournemouth relax Ake stance — reports

Chelsea’s youth revolution could be adding another Chelsea Academy product, but if certain reports are to believed and certain lines are read in-between, said addition could be coming not directly from the Academy but rather from AFC Bournemouth.

The man we’re talking about of course is Nathan Ake, but his semi-absence from the headline isn’t because of some standard Silly Season clickbait. (I do try to avoid that, as much as I can, for whatever that’s worth.) It’s because the report from Sky Sports’ Kaveh Solkehol literally did not contain a name.

Solkehol claims that he’s been told of Chelsea working on a center back transfer, which has agents hopeful and carries a price tag of around £50m. Oh, and it’s from a “rival”, but that probably just means “another Premier League team”.

If we are to play the guessing game that Sky so desperately want us to do, there’s one obvious name where we have to start, Nathan Ake.

And it just so happens that there’s a claim from David Ornstein’s podcast on The Athletic (via Inside Futbol) today about Bournemouth “relaxing” their stance on Ake and potentially allowing him to leave this January. And it just so happens that Chelsea reportedly have a buyback clause of around £40m for our former Academy standout, which possibly puts us ahead of other potential suitors. What a lovely co-inky-dink! You have to squint a little bit and maybe throw in some agents’ fees and performance clauses and a few rounding errors to make £40m look like £50m, but it’s close enough for rumor mill work.

Any other guesses as to who might be this mystery center back? If any of this is true, suddenly the Andreas Christensen exit rumors make more sense, and if it is indeed Ake, then the left back exit rumors are more salient as well since the left-footed Ake can fill in at left back in a pinch as well.