Sky: Chelsea face tough decision over Napoli interest in “pure profit” defender who is also the perfect backup | OneFootball

Sky Sports are today reporting that Chelsea defender Trevoh Chalobah is “one of Napoli’s defensive targets”, seemingly second choice to Bologna defender Sam Beukema.

Napoli continue to be interested in reliable Chelsea defender

This backs up similar rumours we heard earlier in the year about Napoli’s interest in the defender, who had another good season both on loan at Crystal Palace and back at Chelsea to continue to grow his reputation across the continent. Last night he made his England debut, against Senegal.

You can see their report in the clip embedded here:

Chalobah’s future could still go either way

Trevoh Chalobah makes his England debut. (Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)

This story conflicts with an exclusive from Football Insider we reported on yesterday, which held that Chelsea were finally starting to realise they had a really reliable defender on their hands in the academy product, and were now leaning towards keeping him in the squad next season.

We will know a lot more at 5pm today – we assumed Chalobah will be included in the Club World Cup squad, and will therefore look set to be fixed as a squad player for us in the season to come, as those reports claimed.

However if he’s left out, that suddenly means he’s back in the freeze out as he was a year ago, and we can expect talk of the Napoli move and others to increase.

To us, it makes total sense to have Chalobah stay around, as a home grown fan favourite who is on affordable wages and won’t gripe about not necessarily being a first team starter when everyone is fit.

On the other hand, the pure profit of an academy sale might be too tempting for the sporting directors to turn down, if the Italian side actually put their money where their mouth is.