Sassuolo confirm Chelsea talks, Jérémie Boga buyback option

Former Chelsea hot prospect Jérémie Boga is having the best season of his young career so far, with 6 goals and 3 assists for a generally not very good US Sassuolo side, having featured in all but one of their Serie A games this season, starting 18. In fact, outside of an injury last winter, he’s been a key player for them ever since arriving 18 months ago on a cut-rate fee believed to be as low as just £3.5m.

It was reported at the time that the low fee was offset by a buyback clause, which, combined with his head-turning performances, have led to suggestions that Chelsea might want to bring back the 23-year-old exciting winger.

Both of those rumors were surprisingly confirmed by Sassuolo CEO Giovanni Carnevali today.

“Chelsea can buy him back in June. We have excellent relations with them, we met with them before Christmas also for other operations, because we like [to] have a collaborative relationship. They can take him back but we can also do an operation together: we can take him back, there is total openness”

-Giovanni Carnevali; source: TMW via Google Translate

I’m not entirely sure what the last bit means — we can buy back Boga and loan him back to Sassuolo? — but either way, it sounds like the Boga-to-Chelsea train is loading at the station and you might want to get on board.

I haven’t seen any guesses as to how much our buyback might be, but it would likely be well below the 80-100m it might take to win the Jadon Sancho or even Wilfried Zaha sweepstakes. Chelsea aren’t necessarily hurting for money, but that doesn’t mean we should be spending frivolously (as we already showed in January).

Boga will have two years left on his Sassuolo contract in June, and has also been linked with Napoli and AC Milan. His lone Chelsea appearance remains the surprise start under Antonio Conte in the first match of the 2017-18 season (which quickly went downhill for various reasons, none of which had anything to do with Boga himself).