In an effort to strengthen their roster ahead of manager Enzo Maresca’s debut season at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea plans to make another run at Napoli striker Victor Osimhen this summer.
Over the past few weeks, the Italian has already received significant support in the form of signings: Tosin Adarabioyo, Omari Kellyman, Marc Guiu, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, and Renato Veiga make up the first five players brought in under his leadership. However, Chelsea still lacks a true center forward, an area of the field that needs to be prioritized.
While Nicolas Jackson showed his quality during the previous campaign, Mauricio Pochettino’s coaching style also made his rawness very apparent. While he scored an impressive 14 goals in his debut season, his total of Expected Goals was 19.86. This meant that he missed nearly six goals’ worth of opportunities during the domestic season, indicating the need for a much more clinical finisher at the club.
Enter Osimhen, who the Blues previously decided to avoid due to his massive release clause earlier this year but it now appears though they’re going back on that decision. With just two years left on his current deal though, it remains to be seen how Chelsea will manage to secure the star, although reports suggest that Romelu Lukaku could be part of a player-plus-cash deal that’d see him turn out for Napoli ahead of the 2024/25 campaign.
Throughout his career, Osimhen’s numbers have continuously increased, first at Wolfsburg, then Lille, and now at Napoli. His 17 goals last season was his lowest since joining the Serie A four years prior, and that was primarily because of a hamstring injury he sustained early in the campaign that kept him out of a number of games.
His 2022–23 campaign, which saw him score 31 goals in 39 games across all competitions and help the team win its first Scudetto in over 30 years, initially caught Chelsea’s attention. It now appears that there is a renewed chance that he will play in the Premier League the following season.
However, all of this suggests that when the new English football season begins, Osimhen might have trouble getting off to a quick start. Despite missing much of the season to play for Napoli because of his involvement in the Africa Cup of Nations and an early-season hamstring injury, WhoScored reports that he managed to accumulate an absurd 54 offsides in 38 appearances across all competitions.
It is evident that Osimhen has an issue that Maresca would need to address right away when compared to Chelsea striker Jackson’s 35 in 44 games or Liverpool forward Darwin Nunez’s 49 in 57 appearances across all competitions last year. That is 1.6 offsides per 90 minutes for the entire season. Osimhen might be more of a hassle than Maresca currently thinks. Jackson clearly struggled with timing his runs to stay onside under Pochettino, as was frequently brought up in the first part of the season.
This is not just a problem from last season either, as Osimhen recorded 1.1 offsides per 90 minutes in the Serie A in 2022–2023 before semi-automated offsides were introduced in Italy. This means that the number of offsides per 90 increased dramatically after the technology was implemented last season, suggesting that the striker may continue to experience this problem for the rest of his career.
