£390,000 a week will struggle to replace these two tactical weapons midfielder brought to Chelsea – opinion | OneFootball

It was confirmed by Fabrizio Romano last night that N’Golo Kante is on the verge of joining Al Ittihad in Saudi Arabia.

The midfielder had seemed content to stay at Chelsea until his head was turned recently by some eye watering offers.

It’s a blow to our plans – we wanted to keep the France international on an incentive based contract – but moving on might be useful too. We have to blow the whole thing up, may as well finish the job all at once.

We will certainly need to find a talented ball winner to replace him, and one who can offer as much dynamic running and pressing forwards will be hard to find. Kante’s pace was such an underrated asset, and his burst of acceleration was really what made him such an effective tackler and interceptor. He read it perfectly, and then was better equipped than those around him to get to the ball.

It will be hard to find a player with those qualities, let alone the superb physicality that Kante had to complement it. Those two qualities have brought a huge amount to this team and will be impossible to replicate right away.

His wages are an enormous £390,000 a week, and that can be spent on a replacement – but it could be another painful process finding one anywhere nearly as good. Moises Caicedo is going to cost £80m – is his ceiling close to Kante’s?