Chelsea must pay release clause: Sevilla director Monchi explains Koundé situation

Sevilla director of football Ramón Rodríguez Verdejo, i.e. “Monchi” held a press conference in the last few hours, during which he went into great detail on the Jules Koundé situation.

The short of it is: Chelsea must pay the release clause if we want the 22-year-old center back. That’s at least €80m, possibly €90m if the reports of it going by €10 for the final couple weeks of the transfer window are true.

“The possibility that he can leave here before midnight is the same as other colleagues who have release clauses. Just like [Lucas] Ocampos or Bono, we wouldn’t be able to do anything there.”

The long of it is: Chelsea have not come close to changing Sevilla’s mind, despite all the rumors. As Monchi claims, we made just the one offer, last Wednesday (€50-55m), and did not respond to their counter-offer from Friday (€65-70m), which means that now we’d have to pay the release clause (€80-90m). I’m guessing at those values based on the previous reporting around this situation, Sevilla’s supposedly “sudden” €15m increase, and the above-mentioned release clause stance.

“Most of [the approaches were] rejected by the player himself but there was a club that he liked, which was Chelsea. The first and only formal offer was last Wednesday, around five in the afternoon, with an amount that did not satisfy our desires and conditional on Chelsea selling a player.

“It was an important offer, considering the current world where there are so many hardships, but it did not meet our demands, conditions, or quantities. I spoke to the player’s agent some time ago because the more time that passed, the more difficult it would be for him to leave. We put as a deadline the 20th, and we extended that to the 25th. We responded with a counter-offer with a deadline of last Friday night (the 27th) and they have not responded. Since then there has been no contact. Chelsea’s formal offer, Sevilla’s formal response, but nothing else.”

So that seems pretty clear unfortunately. The delays around the Kurt Zouma transfer certainly didn’t make meeting their demands any simpler for us, but it sounds like we missed our deadlines even if we had intended to meet them, at least from Sevilla’s perspective. I doubt Marina Granovskaia’s going to give a detailed press conference like that anytime soon, so we are left to speculate as to our intentions and actions.

Oh, and as far as Koundé’s little mini-strike last weekend, it sounds like that’s already been smoothed over.

“The decision not to travel to Elche was made jointly. He is a magnificent guy and a magnificent professional, but he is not a superhero. [He] asked us for a little time, although he was willing to play. Logical and little else. [...] People will see what happened as normal [just as it did once with] the great Daniel [Alves] and the Sevilla fans love him a lot.”

-Monchi; source: Marca

Sounds like they’ll get to love him for at least one more season, before a third straight summer saga.