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Rabat – Chelsea has reportedly refused to assign official shirt numbers to a few players deemed surplus to requirement, including Morocco’s Hakim Ziyech.
Fabrizio Romani, a Sports journalist specializing in footballers’ news transfers, reported yesterday that Ziyech, Romelu Lukaku, and Callum Hudson-Odoi have received no official jersey numbers from Chelsea.
“Chelsea expect all of them to leave the club in the next weeks,” the highly regarded football transfer journalist tweeted yesterday.
Meanwhile, converging reports have suggested that Lukaku and Hudson-Odoi have been in talks with a number of elite European clubs like Juventus and Fulham.
Ziyech’s future, however, remains uncertain – particularly following the recent collapse of much-reported discussions between Chelsea and Al Nassr.
There have been mixed reports about the reasons behind the failure of Ziyech’s transfer to the Saudi football league. Some reports claimed that the deal collapsed after the Atlas Lion failed to pass his medical test because of an alleged knee injury.
But the well-informed sports journalist Falah Al Qahtani disputed this claim, reporting instead that Ziyech did not even undergo a medical examination with Al Nassr.
“Al Nassr asked him (Ziyech) to come to Madrid for the examination in the presence of the club doctor, and the player refused and insisted that the examination should be done in Morocco,” the journalist revealed.
Read also: Hakim Ziyech Confident He Can Deliver for Chelsea
Meanwhile, another report has recently claimed that Chelsea and a Saudi club are re-negotiating a transfer deal for Ziyech, while others have said that some top-tier European clubs are still interested in securing the services of the Moroccan playmaker.
Despite struggling for playing time at Chelsea over the past season, Ziyech has remained one of the Moroccan national football team’s key, undroppable starters.
His impressive performances at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar played a crucial role in Morocco’s historic World Cup journey, leading many fans and observers to contend that the Moroccan player’s level only dropped at Chelsea because he felt unloved, unwelcome and was constantly not allowed to play in his preferred position.
