By the time Chelsea struck a deal with Palmeiras to sign Estêvão Willian in the summer of 2024, the club had long since been transformed into football’s great trading emporium. Under the ownership of Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, Chelsea seemed to exist in a state of permanent churn. New recruits came so fast and so thick it was difficult to keep track.
The nature of the transfer market is sufficiently opaque that a precise figure is hard to pin down, but in the two years between Boehly and Eghbali’s consortium taking charge at Stamford Bridge in May 2022 and the completion of the £51m deal for Estêvão, Chelsea signed somewhere in the region of 29 senior players.
More than 20 would follow between the transfer being arranged and Estêvão – having turned 18 in April, meaning Fifa’s regulations now permitted him to move – arriving. Chelsea’s transfer strategy is now so far-reaching that at least five players are out in the wild in much the same position, awaiting their date of departure for west London. Two of them, both teenagers, scored in the Champions League on Wednesday alone, Geovany Quenda for Sporting and Kairat’s Dastan Satpaev.
In that context, it is understandable that the excitement over Estêvão was a little tempered. He may have signed his first commercial deal with Nike at the age of 10. He may have been playing for Palmeiras at the age of 16. He may have boasted a burgeoning reputation as Brazil’s next big thing, and come with the sort of references that should be taken seriously.
At that stage, though, he was also just a name, an idea, a theory that belonged to what was, by the standards of football in general and Chelsea in particular, the distant future. And besides, the club’s record at that stage was mixed at best. Chelsea spent £62m on Mykhailo Mudryk in January 2023. The next summer, two signings from Brazil, Ângelo and Deivid Washington, came in and were instantly shipped out on loan. Chelsea were acting as the game’s foremost talent wholesaler.
Based on the evidence of the first four months of his Chelsea career, the Estêvão signing should come to exist in a category of his own. The caveat remains necessary only because of his youth. He has moved across an ocean, with his parents and 10-year-old sister, at the age of 18. He is so young that, as he told Sky Sports earlier this month, he had to be given special dispensation to leave Brazil’s training camp in order to pass his driving test. There are no guarantees at his age.
And yet his impact has been both immediate and seismic. During the summer, when Estêvão faced Chelsea in the Club World Cup, Cole Palmer needed just a few minutes on the pitch with him to decide that his soon-to-be team-mate was a rare talent. In four months, Estêvão has won the hearts of Stamford Bridge and the mind of his head coach, Enzo Maresca. His last-gasp winner against Liverpool, his first goal for the club, had a galvanising effect on what had been an inchoate side. Chelsea have lost only once in all competitions since.
That improvement has allowed Maresca’s team to rise from the general mayhem of the Premier League’s upper mid-table to second; they now appear to be the last challengers standing, the one team who block the path between Arsenal and a procession to the title. A couple of months ago, the idea that Arsenal’s trip across London on Sunday would feel like a pivotal moment in the season would have seemed ridiculous.
Far more importantly, so electric is the thrill of watching his talent unfold that Estêvão has achieved what many felt impossible, particularly in Palmer’s injury-enforced absence: he has infused Maresca’s team with a flicker of excitement. Palmer may return this weekend, but Estêvão has already taken a side that could feel mechanical and sprinkled it with stardust.
In doing so, he has almost single-handedly validated the strategy adopted by Boehly, Eghbali and their colleagues since arriving in English football. Under their consortium, Chelsea have relentlessly and expensively targeted players who they regard as the most compelling emerging talents in the game.
That policy is easier to articulate than it is to effect. Estêvão is not the only success of the club’s pile-em-high approach to the transfer market. Moisés Caicedo, Pedro Neto and Palmer, of course – alongside a handful of others – have all been excellent value, regardless of cost.
But compared with them, Estêvão was a more obvious risk, a teenager for a premium fee with just a few dozen senior appearances to his name at that point, most of them in a league that is not a traditional market. His performance against Barcelona this week, a display that led Folha de São Paulo in Brazil to compare him favourably with Lamine Yamal – they called the pair the “two gems of the new generation” – was enough to suggest that the bet has paid off handsomely.
It was grimly predictable that, within a few hours of that game, stories circulated that Estêvão had been a target for Barcelona, and that perhaps there were some who might like to see him one day in the blaugrana.
That is inevitable, of course, given Estêvão’s promise. It is what Chelsea do about it that matters. At 18, Estêvão has done enough to suggest that he is the sort of generational talent Chelsea had hoped for; the sort of talent that the Premier League may not have seen since the early days of Cristiano Ronaldo; the sort of talent that would be called a franchise player in the US.
Whether that is how Chelsea’s model works is not yet clear. That is the price of being a standard-bearer; it involves blazing a new trail. Is the aim of all of that trading to find a player like Estêvão, ensconce him in London and build a dynasty around him? Or is it to sell him on, years down the line, for some vast profit, and go through it all again? It is a question that will only be answered in time: is the churn a temporary feature of this Chelsea or is it a permanent fixture?
Photograph by José Bretón/Getty Images