BREAKING: Fabrizio Romano says major Chelsea deal is “off” – fans will be gutted | OneFootball

Well, that’s the end of that chapter.

Almost exactly a week after the news broke through Fabrizio Romano that Chelsea were interested in AC Milan Mike Maignan, the same Italian insider has given the death knell to the deal.

Romano says Chelsea wouldn’t pay what Milan wanted

Fabrizio Romano’s Tweet announcing that Mike Maignan deal is dead.

In the end the standoff from a few days ago seems to have stood. The Blues said €15m was their max, Milan tried to squeeze more out of them knowing there was the pressure of tonight’s Club World Cup deadline, and Chelsea refused to pay up.

If it really did come down to something like €5m, that’s immensely frustrating given the last couple of years of bad goalkeeping we’ve had to endure. How can you spend close to €30m on Brighton’s third choice keeper then baulk at €20m for an elite stopper a few years later?

We’re going to be thinking about this moment every time Sanchez punts a kick straight to the opposition this year.

Fans likely to be frustrated by penny pinching

Perhaps this is just good business – drawing a line and refusing to be tempted to cross it. But one has to feel that missing out on a potentially game-changing player over a sum of money which is really insignificant for a team willing to spend tens of millions on Brazilian teenagers every summer.

The claims given to Romano that Chelsea “maintain full trust” in the goalkeepers already on the books just doesn’t ring true. 3 of the 4 have been dropped from the first team at some point in the last 2 years, and the 4th is a teenager who so far has a handful of senior appearances in Belgium.

If we really trusted them, we wouldn’t have spent a week trying to make this deal happen.