Chelsea not interested in giving Inter Milan buyback for Cesare Casadei — report

In addition to a frantic search for players to reinforce the squad and help close the gap to the top of the Premier League, Chelsea have also spent considerable efforts (and funds) in acquiring top young talent who could help the team in the near future. (Ed.note: analogous, in a way, to stocking the minor league farm system of an MLB team, for example.)

Having closed the deal for Aston Villa midfielder Carney Chukwuemeka, our next target in that regard could be the similarly talented and promising Cesare Casadei at Inter Milan. This may be a more complicated operation, with an €8m bid reportedly already rejected and Inter asking for as much as €20m, and with a buy-back clause as well.

According to the Times (via Metro), that’s where Chelsea have drawn the line however. We may be very much interested in the 19-year-old, but we’re not at all interested in including a buy-back option for Inter to use down the line — an unsurprising stance given the value we assign to such clauses when we use them in our own outgoing transfers (even if we haven’t really taken advantage of any quite yet, outside of an unofficial one for Nemanja Matić back in the day).

Competition for Casadei’s signature appears to be strong, but that was the case of Chukwuemeka and Gabriel Slonina as well. But Inter might be quite reluctant to do business without a buyback, in which case we might have to admit defeat this time around.