Alfie Gilchrist is being openly touted by Chelsea for a loan move this summer in to the Championship with other League One clubs interested. The right sided centre back come right back has already enjoyed a good season in the Chelsea first team, and now the Blues believe his development for one season needs to be elsewhere.

Swansea City have been linked with the player, at twenty years of age a certain name to remember for the future, however there has been no contact or interest from the Swans ‘so far’ this summer. There is firm interest from Preston, Leeds and Blackburn Rovers and at the time of writing it could be Leeds who obtain his services. Joe Rodon (Spurs) and Connor Roberts (Burnley) have returned to their prospective clubs, and Leeds will not have the ready cash of recent seasons, so a loan option could work well for them. They do have a parachute payment this season but this is a club still banking on promotion. This month Leeds will pay out 73 million pounds in transfer instalments - and overall they reportedly owe 190 million in total instalments alone. Reports also suggest they will need to sell around 100 million pounds of talent to manage this process.

And Swans fans think their club is in trouble.

Alfie Gilchrist has made a number of appearances for Chelsea in the Premier League having recently signed a new contract to 2026. The Swans are linked due to the successful loans of current England internationals Marc Guehi and Conor Gallagher in recent times and of course Bashir Humphreys last season. Even Tammy Abraham launched his loan career at the Swans before moving on in another loan move to Aston Villa. He left Chelsea in 2021 for around forty million pounds. That in itself proves the value of gradual loan moves for bigger clubs. We do know Chelsea were impressed by Bashir’s development at the Swans and he gave a glowing personal report to the Blues on the training and development he received at Swansea. It isn’t always about playing, it’s learning to live in a different environment, standing on your own two feet, experience different training methods, regimes and maturing as a player away from home. The Swans have always impressed Chelsea with these loans.

The link to Swansea City is Josh Marsh who is on friendly terms with Swans Sporting Director Paul Watson. Ex Swans employee Marsh is now the ‘Loans and pathways’ manager at Chelsea. Couple that with the decent relationship they have and there’s no doubt both will be talking at this time of the season. Alfie’s latest Chelsea contract has been assessed as around six thousand pounds a week. Achievable even for the Swans, the issue there being even at a young age Alfie could well unseat Ben Cabango or Harry Darling, people genuinely believe he is that good.

It’s always nice to give our readers some in-depth well sourced information on players the club are linked to. However, as we said we have been told, and it has been stated elsewhere that Alfie Gilchrist hasn’t been the subject of any interest by the Swans. He may well be a well researched target, he may even be someone Paul Watson inquires about during the run up to the transfer window opening on June 14th, but as of today there’s nothing to report.

We will continue to report on players linked to the Swans this transfer window and will always give you well researched facts and information at the Indy.

Photographs licensed from Reuters

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