CHELSEA hope to have a pair of star-studded Levis in their dressing room – but not in the way you think.
Centre half Levi Colwill is already an established member of the first team squad.
But next summer Portuguese wonderkid Geovany Quenda will be arriving at the club. And he is so good that he was allowed to train in jeans as a kid.
Quenda was born in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa and migrated to Portugal in 2016 aged nine.
On arrival he tried his luck at football with amateur side Damaiense but did not have any kit.
Club officials went to find some but by the time they came back, Quenda was already showing his blistering potential so they let him carry on playing in his normal trousers.
A Blues insider said: “He broke a lot of records that day. He then went with them to a tournament and totally bossed it. That’s when he caught the attention of Portugal’s bigger clubs.”
Quenda was quickly snapped up by leading Portuguese team Benfica but in a bizarre episode ended up quitting to join their fierce rivals Sporting Lisbon soon after.
Benfica had promised the young boy a bedroom at their academy in Seixal but then went back on the deal.
Neighbours Sporting seized their chance and put him up and from there he has created shockwaves with his burgeoning talent.
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He was playing for the Under-23 side aged 16 and under Ruben Amorim, who is now manager at Manchester United he was given a first team chance.
At 17 yrs and 95 days Quenda became the youngest player in history to score in Portugal’s La Liga top flight – taking the record from Cristiano Ronaldo.
He is the youngest player from Sporting to start in the Champions League and at 16 was the leading scorer in Portugal’s Under-23 league.
Although Chelsea say a deal has only been signed ‘in principle’ Quenda will be coming to England in summer 2026 to join a steady stream of young foreign talent on its way over.
Brazilian winger Estevao Willian is coming in a few months’ time and Ecuadorian midfielder Kendry Paez is on his way.
At a more senior level, Chelsea have agreed an £18.5 million fee for midfielder Dario Essugo – Portuguese like Quenda.
FAN-TASTIC
CHELSEA have been winning but not singing. And to try to put that right a group of fed-up season ticket holders have taken action.
A group called We Are The Shed had a trial run of a ‘singing section’ in the Upper Tier of the famous stand at Stamford Bridge last week.
Around 120 diehards have worked with the club in an effort to gather all those who want to generate noise and atmosphere together in the same group of seats in Block Four.
While the deafening Danes from FC Copenhagen were impossible to compete with during last Thursday’s Conference League victory for The Blues, there was a visible and audible know of fans stoking things up.
The atmosphere or lack of it at home games has been a big talking point among Chelsea fans in recent seasons. It is the same at most Premier League stadiums these days though in their defence.
We Are The Shed are on the lookout for new recruits to join their growing band.
ROMAN IN RUINS
ROMAN ABRAMOVICH has turned his back on football since being forced to give up his beloved Chelsea.
The Russian billionaire remains furious over the Theresa May Government withdrawing his “golden visa” in 2018.
Four years later, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine saw the Boris Johnson Government force Abramovich to sell the club as part of the sanctions against Russian financial interests.
And close friends report that Abramovich has barely watched a game since being left with no option other than to hand the Blues over to the Todd Boehly-led consortium.
One said: “Roman still likes football. But he doesn’t go to games any more. It was always about Chelsea.”
Some £2.5bn of the sale price earmarked for victims of the war, remains stuck in an escrow account.
NO LAUGHING MATTER
AMID a frantic flurry of interviews and announcements from Manchester United last week, one briefing slipped out which would have pricked ears at Stamford Bridge.
It has emerged that Red Devils minority owners, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, has declared war on the club’s bloated wage bill.
After branding some United players “overpaid”, the British billionaire wants to scale back base wages and focus on performance related incentives.
This news was rather well received within the corridors of power at Chelsea, who have been doing the same for a couple of years now.
Many were quick to laugh when the club’s American owners, Behdad Eghbali and Todd Boehly, started dishing out nine-year deals with the incentive of a big bump when certain targets are hit.
Chelsea’s latest published accounts, for the year to June 2023, showed wages rising from £340.2million to £404m.
However, the Blues owners have made huge efforts to trim their expenditure on wages back.
It has also been noted at the Bridge that the restructuring at other top club’s, with multiple high-level people in place to look after recruitment, is starting to mirror the changes at Chelsea – who have two sporting directors in Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley.
UNLUCKY 13
LIFE as a professional footballer may seem like paradise – and it can be. But what people on the outside don’t often see is the sacrifice that goes into getting there.
And forward Christopher Nkunku illuminated that in a recent interview. Born and raised in the suburbs of Paris, his blossoming skills earned him a place at France’s national football academy at Clariefontaine – some 35 miles away.
Maybe not so far but Nkunku explained: “You are only 13 years old and you move out of home. It was really hard. Since then I have not lived in my family house and this is hard.
“But you remember you are here for football because you have a dream and you have to sacrifice to achieve that.”
Given that Nkunku played for Paris Saint-Germain then to Germany to join RB Leipzig and now Chelsea in London, that is quite the nomadic lifestyle. And none of it with any guarantee of success.
CAUSING A STER
RAHEEM STERLING has been voted into UEFA’s official Team of the Week after his sterling display for loan club Arsenal last Wednesday.
The winger is not yet thinking about his long term future as time ticks away on his season long spell in North London.
It seems obvious he does not have a future under current boss Enzo Maresca but with two years left on his contract in summer is under no pressure to quit – at least not on Chelsea’s terms.
There are rumours that a host of Saudi Arabian clubs are taking interest in the 30-year-old who last week became the first English player to be directly involved in at least one goal for four different clubs in the Champions League: Liverpool, Man City, Chelsea and now Arsenal.
But they can forget it. One place Sterling won’t be going is the Pro-League. There is money and adulation on tap from star-hungry Saudi fans but it doesn’t suit the born and bred Londoner.
