“Unprecedented” situation with youth star looks bad says academy expert | OneFootball

Chelsea Youth is a great follow on Twitter, and a great person to listen to whenever he’s on the London is Blue podcast.

He went on there for a chat this week about the academy, and top of the agenda is the freeze-out of Josh Acheampong, who has gone from the cusp of a first team breakthrough to being left out of games at every level by the club until he signs a new deal.

CY compared his situation to those of players who have been treated in a similar way over the last couple of years, and didn’t come out with too many hopeful conclusions

“It’s almost unprecedented in a way because whenever we’ve seen this sort of behaviour before, we’ve seen it with Conor Gallagher, we’ve seen it with Mason Mount, we saw it with Lewis Bate, Tino Livramento, Myles Peart-Harris, all three in the same summer, it’s the offseason or a time when there are fewer games. But this has come at the start of a new season, at a time when Acheampong’s star is on the rise. He’s made a breakthrough. He’s impressing for club and country.”

“It seems really avoidable and I hope it’s something that they can work out to a meaningful resolution. But if you go back through the 5 players I’ve just mentioned where they’ve done this before, it hasn’t resolved itself with a new deal, it’s resolved itself with the departure of the those players. I’m not really given to being positive about this right now.

Josh Acheampong trains for Chelsea in preseason.

Chelsea’s youth policy risks losing another star

In Acheampong’s situation is does seem a particularly backwards move – a young player who is worried about not getting enough game time gets frozen out, gets no time, and his decision to leave is almost made up for him.

Given our recent history of letting talented youth players walk away, this would be a really painful one.