According to multiple reports this morning, including from Fabrizio Romano and The Athletic’s David Ornstein, Chelsea and AC Milan have agreed a deal for Christopher Nkunku, with the forward now set to travel to Italy for his medical and the final bits of paperwork.
And yes, it is indeed a permanent transfer, not a loan or any such nonsense. Milan are reportedly paying €42m (£36m) all told to make it happen, and we’ve retained a sell-on clause in case his value goes up on a potential future move. Romano says that the fixed portion of the fee is “higher than €35m”. Either way, it’s a decent bit of business for a player who has not lived up to expectations at Chelsea — that knee injury certainly didn’t help — and checked out a long time ago. A change of scenery could do wonders for him.
Nkunku did play a key role in our UEFA Conference League campaign last season, and we did get to witness his iconic balloon celebration a fair few times at least.
Milan is putting together a strong team. After last years fiasco, they managed to get Allegri who will definitely be an improvement this season, on top of that they got some great players as well. Nkunku could very well be the last transfer they make, there isn't that much time left and we could end up with no more moves. But we are looking at this and we can safely say that they are not going to be that great.
This means that we will end up with Milan reaching for top four, and that should be good enough for them. Of course that's not that big of a deal, and they are a level of team that should be fighting for a title, while they are not doing that at the moment, it's still true and we should appreciate the way they are doing it.