Chelsea used sister club’s scouting reports to make stealthy move for €15m winger | OneFootball

A club like Chelsea is so massive that most transfer moves are picked up on long before they happen. It’s very unusual for a player to be signed without plenty of advance notice that the club are watching them.

But in the case of Angelo Gabriel, Chelsea seemed to swoop from nowhere. We had heard no links, then suddenly it was a done deal and he was a Chelsea player. So how did it happen? Well now we know.

Simon Johnson’s piece on the Athletic explains that not only is the 18 year old going to go on loan to our new sister club Strasbourg, he was in fact a target of the French club before Chelsea got involved. Apparently their director of football had been to watch Gabriel play in each of the last 3 years to try and see if he could get a bargain move to Ligue 1 arranged.

Once Chelsea’s owners had bought Strasbourg, it just became a case of sharing his information and conviction, and then Blues just had to write the cheque. It’s an interesting new aspect to the transfer market now, and something that could mean plenty more unexpected signings arriving at Chelsea in the years to come.