As he walked with his Chelsea teammates on a lap of appreciation around the Stamford Bridge pitch in May, flanked by his jubilant father celebrating a hard-fought win over Bournemouth on the Premier League’s final day by pumping a fist towards the Matthew Harding Stand, a shirtless and smiling Conor Gallagher gave off no sense of a man saying goodbye.
But a move to Atletico Madrid in a deal worth €40million is fast becoming the likeliest outcome — one that would bring to a close 18 months in which the England international’s future at Chelsea has been the source of endless uncertainty.
Throughout the summer, the message coming out of Stamford Bridge was that two very different options remained open for Gallagher: he could sign a new contract or be sold. Allowing him to go into the final year of his existing deal and reach free agency in July 2025 was one scenario that owners Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly were utterly unwilling to countenance.
So the revelation that Gallagher twice turned down the offer of a new contract at Chelsea — once in early June and again in late July — against the backdrop of serious interest from Atletico Madrid landed with a jolt, undercutting the notion that the Cobham graduate wanted nothing more than to keep playing for his boyhood club.
It is also an incomplete picture of a more nuanced, complicated reality. To tell the fuller story, The Athletic gathered information from various individuals involved in the Gallagher saga, all of whom spoke anonymously in order to protect relationships.
Chelsea offered Gallagher the same contract twice: two years guaranteed followed by a club option to extend for a third, on a vastly increased salary than the previous deal he had signed as a 21-year-old before joining West Bromwich Albion on loan in September 2020. His new wages would, according to those with knowledge of the club’s pay scale, have pushed him up into the same range as top midfield earners Enzo Fernandez and Moises Caicedo.
On the first occasion, Chelsea tabled a formal contract offer in early June after Gallagher had indicated he did not want to join Aston Villa, who had expressed serious interest in signing him. The second time around, as talks with Atletico intensified in late July, club officials checked in with the England international’s camp to see if he was prepared to reconsider the same terms.
A banner of Gallagher at Stamford Bridge (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
Both times the answer from Gallagher’s camp was no.
Whether this offer should be regarded as a two-year or a three-year deal, given the nature of the option, is a matter for the parties involved to debate. What is indisputable is that it stood in marked contrast to almost every other first-team contract handed out by Chelsea under Clearlake and Boehly, where a minimum of six guaranteed years has become the standard.
Within this context, Chelsea’s offer of a much shorter deal sent a clear signal that Gallagher’s long-term presence in the first-team squad was not viewed in the same way as that of fellow midfielders Fernandez, Caicedo, Romeo Lavia or Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, one year older than Gallagher, who arrived on a six-year contract from Leicester City in June.
Chelsea’s rationale was that while Gallagher’s off-ball excellence had helped him establish himself as a regular starter under Mauricio Pochettino, he was projected to be a squad player in new head coach Enzo Maresca’s more possession-focused, positional style of play. As such, while they were willing to reward his performances with a big pay rise and potentially be proven wrong in their assessment, they were not prepared to risk limiting themselves in football and financial terms by committing to a long-term deal on such terms.
From a business perspective, such a short guaranteed contract would also have allowed Chelsea to protect Gallagher’s transfer value beyond the summer of 2025, giving them more time to assess his squad role under Maresca and potentially canvass the market for him if he was deemed surplus to requirements or wanted to leave.
Chelsea’s pitch to Gallagher’s camp was that if he took the deal, continued to improve in 2024-25 and became a regular starter under Maresca, he could quickly put himself in a strong position to return to the negotiating table and secure a longer contract in his higher salary range.
This stance landed poorly with Gallagher, who had done much in 2023-24 to silence critics who doubted his ability to contribute to a ball-dominant team, leading Chelsea’s entire squad in minutes played across all competitions and proving one of Pochettino’s most reliable performers in a side that averaged 58.6 per cent possession in the Premier League, according to FBref.
Gallagher could be forgiven for feeling he merited a more solid place in Chelsea’s long-term squad plans, and more stability in general. In terms of individual development, he has barely put a foot wrong in his career, returning from a series of productive loans in the summer of 2022 to blossom into a significantly positive contributor at Stamford Bridge.
But he had not done enough to convince Chelsea that he would be worth paying like a regular starter on the type of ultra-long contract so often favoured by Clearlake and Boehly.
Chelsea’s only previous attempt to initiate talks over a new contract was in October 2022. Gallagher’s camp opted not to engage at that time, wary of agreeing to fresh terms when his path to regular game time remained unclear; in the first two months of the 2022-23 campaign, he had started just three games and played 166 minutes in total.
At the end of January 2023 the dynamic shifted when, having started back-to-back Premier League games against Crystal Palace and Liverpool, Gallagher was the subject of serious interest from Everton. They indicated they were prepared to meet Chelsea’s valuation and Gallagher’s camp were informed, but the player made it clear he had no interest in the move.
The length of the contract offered to Gallagher contrasts with the one signed by Fernandez (Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)
The rest of the year came and went without any progress on a new contract for Gallagher. Operating under the impression that his camp would not consider an extension until he had established himself as a regular starter, Chelsea did not force the issue — and in the meantime, the club maintained an open stance in listening to transfer offers for him.
Throughout last summer’s pre-season tour of the United States, during which Gallagher played more minutes across Chelsea’s five friendlies than any other player in Pochettino’s squad, he was shielded from media duties as speculation swirled that he was set to be sold.
West Ham had a £40million offer turned down and there was serious interest from Tottenham. Chelsea were open to selling what they still considered to be a squad player for the right price, but there was also a degree of reticence inside Stamford Bridge about allowing Gallagher to join a domestic rival for Champions League qualification.
Yet that reticence had not prevented Chelsea from selling Kai Havertz to Arsenal or Mason Mount to Manchester United for what they deemed to be good offers. Nor did Gallagher’s presence deter Clearlake and Boehly from sanctioning around £170million in transfer fees to sign midfielders Caicedo and Lavia in the summer of 2023, six months after completing a nine-figure deal to prise Fernandez from Benfica.
Gallagher continued to play more frequently than anyone else in 2023-24, often wearing the captain’s armband in the lengthy injury absences of Reece James and Ben Chilwell. “It’s priceless to have a player like him,” Pochettino said pointedly in February, offering an early hint at his lack of alignment with Chelsea’s ownership and sporting leadership.
Gallagher’s excellent individual 2023-24 campaign did no harm to his transfer value but, coupled with Chelsea deciding to mutually part ways with Pochettino and hire Maresca, it did set the stage for a fundamental disconnect between the player and the club about his importance to the team in the years ahead.
Having enjoyed the best season of his career to date, Gallagher would ordinarily have been in a very strong position to get everything he wanted in a new contract — but Chelsea’s pivot to positional play with the arrival of Maresca raised new questions about his stylistic fit that he could not readily answer this summer, and entrenched the club’s negotiating position.
Put simply, given the demands of Maresca’s system and Gallagher’s desire to be a regular starter, Chelsea feel it would be a mistake for both parties to enter into a longer-term commitment.
The prospects of a contract extension receded further at the start of July when Chelsea signed Dewsbury-Hall, Maresca’s chief creator at Leicester, intensifying competition for midfield minutes in 2024-25. His six-year deal was also in contrast to the offer made to Gallagher, though his salary is considerably lower than that of Fernandez and Caicedo.
Chelsea accepted a significantly lower transfer fee from Atletico for Gallagher than they could have recouped from another Premier League club at various points in the last 18 months.
That is partly a reflection of the club’s preference to sell Gallagher abroad rather than to a Premier League rival, particularly Tottenham. Partly it is also borne of their determination not to lose him for nothing in 12 months; Clearlake and Boehly consider the situations they inherited with Antonio Rudiger and Andreas Christensen in the summer of 2022 to be ownership malpractice, and have vowed never to let any valuable player reach free agency again.
Gallagher celebrating a goal last season (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Fundamentally, though, it is indicative of the club’s pragmatic calculation that selling him, even at considerably below his peak market value, is still preferable to giving him the combination of a big pay rise and a long-term contract that would have been required to keep him at Stamford Bridge beyond June 2025.
Time may prove them right, and Chelsea might reasonably argue that such cold-eyed judgment is required to construct an elite squad. But the likely sale of Gallagher, coupled with the treatment of Trevoh Chalobah — another popular player squeezed out by signings deemed more suitable for Maresca’s style — could further inflame disaffected match-going supporters who voiced their disdain for the club’s senior decision-makers several times last season.
As with all of their other major decisions this summer, Chelsea are doubling and tripling down on Maresca’s vision of football. Possession-focused positional play is at the heart of the philosophy that the new academy management structure will preach. Liam Rosenior and his staff are also being tasked with implementing that style of play at BlueCo sister club Strasbourg.
The final choice of whether or not to join Atletico now belongs to Gallagher, but his departure from Chelsea this summer looks increasingly inevitable.
(Top photo: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
