News today that we are supposed to be very close to signing 19-year-old Chelsea striker on loan for the season.
The striker is expected to almost double his wages at Chelsea before he goes on loan – and the news from London is he will get a massive £45K/week contract over five years and that’s up from his current wages of £25K/week.
That’s over £2M a year for a 19 year-old, which at least to us is simply amazing and it’s got to be very difficult for these young lads to keep their feet firmly on the ground and appreciate the value of money, with all the temptations out there.
There’s a very good article in the Chronicle today, which illustrates just how much Rafa Benitez has been involved in trying to make this deal happen.
He met with the player a couple of weeks ago at St George’s Park where Tammy was training with the England U21 squad, getting ready for the European U21 Championships to be held in Poland later this month.
Rafa convinced Tammy at that time he would get a lot of playing time at the club.
But the new news is that Rafa Benitez and Antonio Conte have a good relationship, built up when Rafa was managing Napoli from 2013-2015 and Conte was initially managing Juventus before he took the Italian national job in 2014.
The other news is that Antonio has been impressed with the way Rafa man-managed Christian Atsu while on loan here last season.
Certainly Rafa gave the winger a lot of playing time with Christian appearing 35 times with 16 starts and we expect Tammy to start more games than that next season.
Christian’s continual praise of Rafa in the press throughout the season must have been heard by the Chelsea manager and of course Rafa’s man management skills are excellent and he always wants to improve his players.
We did expect Newcastle to be a much bigger attraction this summer now that Rafa Benitez is the manager and that seems to be the case.
Hopefully, once we do well in the coming Premier League season, hopefully with the help of Tammy Abraham, that attraction will be a lot greater next summer at this time.
That’s what we are fervently hoping for.