CHELSEA know only too well how there is no time for settling in new players during the January transfer window.
The ink had barely dried on a then-British-record £107million deal for Enzo Fernandez before he was kitted out in blue and playing 90 minutes on his debut against Fulham in February 2023.
It was precisely a week after the midfielder’s swansong for Benfica and less than two months since winning the World Cup with Argentina in Qatar.
New year signings have to hit the ground running. It was the same first time around for forward Joao Felix and for winger Mykhailo Mudryk.
Which is where the forthcoming attempt to get defender Ben Chilwell out of Chelsea this month hits a major snag.
The latest transfer window has just been thrown open and managers in need of a quick fix are scouring the scouting databases to see who can save their season.
Chilwell, 28, has played just 45 minutes of first-team football this season — as a second-half sub in a one-sided Carabao Cup victory over League Two Barrow on September 24.
Since then he has made the bench once — in the next round when Chelsea got knocked out. And that’s it.
Not a single minute of Premier League action, with the first half of the season gone.
It is fair to say that a player with more than 200 senior games behind him is rustier than the wreck of the Titanic stuck more than two miles down in the North Atlantic since 1912.
Among the many items demanding the attention of new England manager Thomas Tuchel, who started his reign yesterday, Chilwell’s predicament must be one of the most confusing.
After all the German, when manager at Stamford Bridge, felt confident enough in his ability to play his attacking left-sider for the shock victory over Manchester City in the Champions League final of 2021.
Three-and-a-half years later and he might need help from the police to find his one-time first- choice full-back.
On paper, Chilwell looks just the player to bolster any Premier League squad wishing to add pace and experience to its defence.
For the likes of Ipswich, Wolves, Southampton, right up to Manchester United — currently missing Luke Shaw — he would be the perfect off-the-shelf cover man. There is no doubting his quality.
In the fickle world of football, a player with 21 international caps is considered unsuitable by Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca — and in this business that’s fair enough.
But trying to market one of the most high-profile casualties of Maresca’s so-called ‘bomb squad’ is not going to be easy when it is hard to find even a photo of him in Blues kit from the past half a year.
Chelsea may well end up following a similar path to that which managed to secure forward Raheem Sterling a last-minute release from mothballs at Stamford Bridge and a loan deal to Arsenal.
More than two-thirds of Sterling’s £300,000-a-week wages are still being paid by his parent club.
Chilwell — bought in 2020 from Leicester, where he came through the youth ranks — does not earn as much as Sterling. He picks up about
£190,000 a week, which is still a hefty sum.
But after six months in the doldrums, potential suitors will drive an extremely hard bargain to take a punt on an undoubted top-class footballer.
However, he is one who may need his boiler warmed up like an old locomotive before getting up to full steam.
In an ideal world, Chilwell would leave permanently this month. He is surely unhappy not playing and Chelsea would like to get him off the payroll and recoup some cash in the shape of a transfer fee.
But that too could be complicated. With the player under contract until 2027, he could choose to perch in the stands and sit tight for the next two and a half years — earning nearly £25m in the process.
That is unlikely. But the option is there to stick it out in the way fellow left-back Wayne Bridge did at Manchester City for four years after being frozen out.
