Chelsea have £20m transfer escape route after Levi Colwill injury crisis

Only Cole Palmer and Moises Caicedo played more in the Premier League for Chelsea than Levi Colwill last season. In his final year registering as an Under-21, he was one of just two outfield players born in 2003 or after to clock over 3,000 minutes.

Milos Kerkez is the only player younger than Colwill to play more than him last term. When it comes to centre-backs, there is very little competition in this category.

Bournemouth pair Ilya Zabarnyi and, eventually, Dean Huijsen both played a lot but cannot match Colwill for his game time. It is extremely rare for defenders to be as cemented into a team as Colwill under Enzo Maresca.

The most notable recent equivalent is perhaps William Saliba at Arsenal in 2022/23. What jumps out for both Colwill and Saliba is their experience in senior football before making the breakthrough.

Saliba excelled at Marseille on loan having started to get minutes for Saint-Etienne and Nice as a teenager. Colwill stayed domestic in England and helped Huddersfield Town reach the play-offs before working his way into Robert De Zerbi’s impressive Brighton side a year later.

Colwill is now a massive outlier. He is the exception rather than the rule for young centre-backs. His journey has not always been smooth – the first half of last season at Chelsea was tough – but he was preparing to enter his third year at his boyhood club as one of the go-to players.

Injury has promised to upset that. Colwill picked up a problem at the end of Chelsea’s first session back following three weeks off for a belated holiday.

He went from a senior career high of 3,000 career minutes across club and country duties to playing more than 4,100 last year without much of a break. Unlike in 2023/24, where he missed the final few months, Colwill has been instrumental at Chelsea for a while now.

The severity of his injury is not yet known but the signs are not promising. Chelsea had managed to keep the news quiet until Maresca’s press conference on Thursday morning ahead of friendlies against Bayer Leverkusen and Milan this weekend. He will now be unavailable and is a massive doubt for the Premier League opener with Crystal Palace.

Colwill would have been penned in as starting at least one of the friendlies and then definitely in for Palace. The selection in defence has been over his partner with a rotating cast of Tosin Adarabioyo and Trevoh Chalobah covering for Wesley Fofana, who could be back in contention.

Jorrel Hato has arrived to offer back-up but is just 19. He does have a large senior portfolio for someone so young but that comes mostly from games in Holland, where the competition is not as tough. Hato is just as much seen as being behind Marc Cucurella at left-back.

Colwill’s deputy for last season, Benoit Badiashile, has been out with an injury since the Club World Cup. He has been hit with fitness issues for 18 months and rarely played meaningful Premier League matches last season.

Although Chelsea do have a large pool of defenders on paper, there is uncertainty over enough of them to now warrant a conversation over adding to it again in the remaining weeks of the transfer window. Renato Veiga, for example, wants to play at centre-back and could see a change in his career arc again, but that would be a dramatic turn of events.

Veiga was not massively in favour under Maresca before pushing to leave in January with a wish of establishing himself as a centre-back for Portugal. He had been expected to leave only for a move to Atletico Madrid to fall through.

Nothing has yet come up again for Veiga but with Hato, Chalobah, Adarabioyo, Fofana, Josh Acheampong, and youngster Aaron Anselmino, there is no shortage of options. The question is, with Anselmino unproven and hardly tested, plus the injury worries around Fofana and Badiashile, do Chelsea have enough to compete at the top level if Colwill faces a lengthy period out?

Chalobah and Adarabioyo could play together or slot in next to Fofana but one would always be on their wrong side. It is nothing too major for the odd game but make it the case for a few months and it is more of a problem.

Will Badiashile be able to get himself back to full strength? How much is Hato going to be trusted so early in his Stamford Bridge career?

All of this will now have to be debated as Chelsea wait on firm news over the extent of Colwill’s injury. Veiga appears as a non-market way of dealing with it in the short-term, but is there a way to fold him back into the frame at this stage? If not, then one name leaps out.

When it comes to left-sided centre-backs from Cobham, Colwill follows in the footsteps of his England teammate Marc Guehi. The Crystal Palace captain has less than 12 months left on his contract and has been in the mix to leave all summer.

So far there is nothing taking him away from Selhurst Park despite interest from Liverpool, Arsenal, and Tottenham at different points. Chelsea have never been too far away from Guehi either.

They have a 20% sell-on clause in the deal which took him to south London in 2021 in the first place. He was sold for £20million to Palace and has not looked back since.

As a two-footed passer with experience in finals and for his country, Guehi is a natural leader with unfinished business. The hope is that due to his contract, the price could also be brought down as well.

Chelsea would be putting yet another first team centre-back into an already crowded set, though. If Colwill is out for the long run then it might be a necessary risk. The lines are very much blurred.