As a non-native English speaker, Mauricio Pochettino can sometimes struggle to find the correct word to convey exactly what he means.
His press conference after Chelsea’s 3-1 win over Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park on Monday was not one of those times.
“He’s a player with great commitment to the team, always trying to compensate in every situation, in offensive and defensive situations,” the Argentinian said when asked how important Conor Gallagher has become to Chelsea, before adding a memorable flourish. “That is priceless, to have a player like him.”
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Priceless. Of all the adjectives to bestow praise, Pochettino’s choice of the one that evoked the concept of monetary value for Gallagher (intentionally pointed or not) stuck in the mind.
Because for more than a year, Gallagher has been regarded as anything but priceless by Chelsea’s owners and lead football decision-makers. It is common knowledge across the Premier League that £50million ($62.7m) would be enough to get him.
An indication from Everton that they were willing to pay £45million in late January 2023 sparked a serious conversation that only ended when Gallagher made it clear he had no interest in joining a team who were fighting relegation. West Ham United had a £40m bid rejected last summer and Tottenham Hotspur were serious suitors in the final weeks of August, but their valuation was significantly lower than Chelsea’s.
The winter window then came and went without any movement either in his market or on his contract, which will have 12 months left to run at the end of this season.
Dialogue between the 24-year-old’s representatives and Chelsea’s co-sporting director Paul Winstanley remains open and cordial. There is none of the bitterness that hung like a dark cloud over fellow academy-graduate midfielder Mason Mount’s final months at the club last season and, as long as that continues to be the case, there is a significant chance an agreement is reached for Gallagher to extend his contract. But there is also no movement towards that outcome, and no new offer on the table for him to consider.
The reality is Gallagher’s vast improvement this season has been an unexpected development for Chelsea, who were not planning for him to become a key cog in their midfield when they committed more than £300million in transfer fees across the two trading windows of 2023 to recruiting Enzo Fernandez, Andrey Santos, Moises Caicedo, Romeo Lavia and Lesley Ugochukwu to play there.
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Lavia’s almost complete unavailability since signing from Southampton (on the bench twice, playing once for 32 minutes) in the first week of the season has worked in Gallagher’s favour, and he has gone on to make himself indispensable to new head coach Pochettino, ranking behind only Axel Disasi in the squad for minutes played in 2023-24 across all competitions. He has also delivered an emphatic riposte to critics who argued his skill set was not suited to possession football, attempting a career-high 61.1 passes per 90 minutes in the Premier League with an 88.9 per cent completion rate.
Chelsea have had plenty of bad days with Gallagher on the pitch — no one can escape criticism with the club 10th in the Premier League table after 24 games — but arguably their worst performance of the season was the only one he missed, due to a suspension: the 2-1 loss to Manchester United at Old Trafford in December that was far more one-sided than the scoreline suggests, and in which Fernandez and Caicedo were entirely overrun at the base of midfield.
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Pochettino has weaponised Gallagher’s outstanding talent for winning the ball back in his Chelsea pressing system, deploying him ahead of Fernandez and Caicedo without the ball to harry opponents close to their own penalty area. According to data website fbref.com, an average of 0.45 tackles in his team’s attacking third per 90 minutes puts him in the 91st percentile (the best-performing nine per cent) among midfielders in Europe’s top-five domestic leagues, the Champions League and Europa League over the past 365 days.
Beyond tactics, Chelsea’s head coach has done everything in his power to publicly emphasise how highly he rates Gallagher as a player and as a person: praising him at every opportunity, picking him whenever fit and even handing him the captain’s armband for a significant stretch of this campaign when Reece James and Ben Chilwell were injured.
The future, as Pochettino admitted in that press conference after beating Palace, “is a matter for him and the club”. It is in the hands of co-sporting directors Winstanley and Laurence Stewart and, ultimately, Clearlake Capital co-founder Behdad Eghbali and the club’s co-owner Todd Boehly. Gallagher wants what he has always wanted: a long and successful career at Chelsea, his boyhood club. He also, not unreasonably, wants to feel wanted.
Chelsea’s decision to slow-play Gallagher’s contract situation stands in stark contrast to the urgency with which fellow academy graduates James, Armando Broja and Levi Colwill were tied down to new long-term deals in the past 18 months, and all the signs are it has weakened their position.
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Gallagher is playing by far the best football of his career. He has significantly improved almost every aspect of his game, and three goals in Chelsea’s past two matches — both wins — suggest he might finally be rediscovering the scoring touch he demonstrated during formative loan spells at Charlton Athletic and Palace. Barring injury, he is almost certain to be included in England manager Gareth Southgate’s European Championship squad this summer.
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That will naturally be reflected in his salary expectations for any new contract. Renewing him on vastly increased wages may be unpalatable to Chelsea, but the alternative is not much more appealing. The ticking clock on his deal will make it difficult to realise a £50million asking price unless there’s a bidding war, and that dynamic looks unlikely given Gallagher’s preference will have the power to dictate the process.
In recent windows, potential suitors have detected a degree of wariness from Chelsea to sell Gallagher to Spurs, Newcastle United or any other club they consider direct Premier League rivals — a stance that seems illogical if the fundamental talent evaluation is that he is simply not good enough to be a long-term starter at Stamford Bridge. It is also a position that will be entirely impossible to maintain come the summer, when the choice becomes binary: renew or cash in.
Beneath all this is a nagging sense that football judgement will not be the sole factor determining who Chelsea sell in the next window. Despite the insistence from club officials that compliance with the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR) is not as big a concern as has been made out, the informed consensus among those from the outside is that significant funds must be raised before June 30 to avoid breaching the allowable loss limit.
It is hard not to view Chelsea’s unsubtle, unsuccessful attempt to drum up a market for buying Broja in January (he ended up being loaned to Fulham for the rest of the season) through this prism, and the same could be said for the inclusion of a £35million release clause in the new contract Ian Maatsen signed last month before his half-season loan move to Germany’s Borussia Dortmund. Pure profit from selling a Cobham graduate or two would be the easiest way to climb out of any PSR hole, and Gallagher has established himself as their most saleable homegrown product.
Gallagher’s positive development deserves more than to be talked about in such cold financial terms, but the tenor of the discussion is set until his future is resolved one way or another.
The only positive for Pochettino is that if the first seven months of the season are anything to go by, the price hanging over his head will not affect his priceless form.
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(Top photo: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
