Chelsea may be souring on João Félix and his €100m price tag — report

Chelsea spent well over €10m in January to bring in João Félix on loan for the rest of the season from Atlético Madrid, and the magnitude of that short-term investment led to the immediate assumption that we would try to keep him in the long-term as well, beyond just this season.

And while he generated plenty of initial excitement even as his Chelsea career began in less than ideal fashion, with a red card on is otherwise promising debut, his recent returns have been slightly less enamoring. He’s clearly a very skillful player high on flair and bite-size moments of excellence to get people out of their seats, but all it takes is an attention span longer than ten seconds to notice a player who seems to play for himself above all else and who doesn’t really make the team around him any better.

It doesn’t help his case that Chelsea have been in absolutely shocking form during his time here, barely scoring goals let alone winning games, while Atléti have outscored Real Madrid in La Liga during that span and have collected more points than all but one other team, league-leaders Barcelona. He himself has managed just 2 goals in 14 games, the worst ratio of his professional career.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that Chelsea appear to be souring on the idea of a big-money pursuit for the 23-year-old this summer, with the Daily Mail reporting this weekend that we would not be interested in matching Atlético Madrid’s €100m asking price — which they appear to be quite firm on still.

The Mail do add that we might be willing to consider a season-long loan extension, but we surely would want to ensure that we can trim the squad to something more reasonably sized and more manageable first, to establish some proper and solid foundations, before adding any temporary decorations.

There’s unlikely to be a massive bidding war for his services anyway, especially at the prices currently quoted, even if some rumors claim that Manchester United are keeping tabs on the situation as well.