Ben Chilwell has been included in Chelsea’s 25-man squad for the 2024-25 Premier League season.
The England international, 27, was told he was surplus to requirements at the west London club, having not played since the club’s pre-season tour in the summer.
Head coach Enzo Maresca had previously said players on the fringes of Chelsea’s squad “will not get any minutes” if they remained at the club beyond the end of the transfer window. Raheem Sterling was also part of that group before completing a loan move to Arsenal last month.
However, after failing to find a “solution” before the various deadlines around Europe passed, Chilwell has been included in the 25-man group submitted to the league and will soon return to first-team training with the rest of his team-mates. He trained individually at Cobham on Friday.
“We will sit with him and find solutions,” Maresca said. “He is probably going to be back with us (training). We will see.
“At the moment, he is not training with us. The reason why he (was) training apart, is because the idea was for him to leave.”
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Chilwell signed for Chelsea from Leicester City in August 2020 for a fee in the region of £50million. He has gone on to make 106 appearances in all competitions, scoring nine goals.
He starred under Frank Lampard and Thomas Tuchel in 2020-21 as Chelsea won the Champions League before an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury the following November restricted him to just 13 games.
Persistent hamstring issues hampered him in 2022-23 before another in 2023-24 saw him sidelined for much of the first half of the campaign.
He ended last season making just 21 appearances before missing out on a place in England’s squad for the European Championship.
(Julian Finney/Getty Images)
