Kante and Kovacic’s £100m 'replacement' becomes clear as Blues complete two midfield sales

Overnight we heard N’Golo Kante’s free transfer to Al Ittihad confirmed, and just this morning Fabrizio Romano has been online telling us all that Mateo Kovacic’s switch to Man City is a done deal too.

Combined with the departure or Jorginho back in January, this means our regular long term midfield 3 is gone, with players like Ruben Loftus-Cheek also likely to join them. That leaves a major hole in the middle of the park, but Nizaar Kinsella’s piece on the departures in the Evening Standard names the man Chelsea want in as a replacement.

“[Chelsea] hope to sign Caicedo as [Kovacic’s] replacement,” Kinsella reported confidently.

Caicedo has been given a hefty price tag of £100m which looked unpayable for Chelsea at one point, but with more sales comes more spending money.

The fact that it might just be Caicedo coming in strongly indicates that our intentions are to use Andrey Santos in the first team squad next season, and could yet mean that an outgoing Conor Gallagher move is shut down if Mauricio Pochettino thinks that he’s lacking bodies in that area of the pitch.

Overall, it’s been an incredibly significant 24 hours in the development of this new team, and the next 7 days could become even more exciting. Whatever happens, our midfield lineup for the start of next season is going to be entirely different to the one that lined up for the start of last season.