Chelsea attacking outcast Callum Hudson-Odoi has told his boyhood club that he wants to leave permanently this summer as he eyes up regular first team football.
The forward spent last season on loan at Bayer Leverkusen, where he racked up 21 appearances, grabbing one goal and one assist in mixed spell away from Stamford Bridge.
It did little to convince watchers that he would make the cut with the Blues, and he is well down the pecking order following the arrivals of Raheem Sterling, Mykhaylo Mudryk and Noni Madueke in the last two transfer windows, at a total cost of £150m.
First bursting onto the scene in 2018-19 during Chelsea’s Europa League campaign, Hudson-Odoi has appeared over 120 times for the Blues since graduating from the Cobham academy, but looks set to be the next academy star to depart the club following recent departures of Fikayo Tomori, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Tino Livramento.
Though he returned to pre-season training under new Blues boss Mauricio Pochettino, the Athletic report that ‘Hudson-Odoi feels the time has come to move to a club where he has a better chance of regular first team football’, with several Premier League clubs all thought to be interested in signing the 22-year-old winger.
It is added that ‘the winger is expecting to resolve his future soon so he can prepare for the season at his new club’, though no suggestions of what fee will be required to let him leave has been made, but with just 12 months left to run on his current deal and both Chelsea and the winger open to departure, it is not thought that it will be a major stumbling block.
