The 10 WORST Chelsea signings in Premier League history ranked – Torres among four strikers

It may come as some surprise that just two signings from the BlueCo era at Chelsea make it into this list of the 10 worst in Premier League history. It’s comforting in a way that the Blues have a checkered transfer past as well as being laughable in the present.

Last week, we took a detailed look at the club’s 10 best signings of the Premier League era.

This time around, we’re flipping the script with 10 of the very worst now ranked – and we start with a BlueCo gem…

10) Joao Felix

The conversation must have been something along the lines of “do you remember that lightweight prima donna we signed on loan who was very clearly entirely unsuited to Premier League football? Let’s sign him permanently for £46m.”

In what was BlueCo’s peak throwing excrement at the wall and seeing what sticks era of recruitment at Stamford Bridge, Felix‘s signing was perhaps the most bizarre, a) because they had seen first-hand what a weak footballer he was and is, and b) because he was never going to get a game ahead of the already established superstar Cole Palmer.

He played 363 minutes of Premier League football before moving to AC Milan on loan, and then to Al-Nassr for almost as much as they paid for him. If Chelsea’s co-sporting directors were as good at buying as selling the club would have had a couple more Premier League titles in the bag by now.

9) Kepa Arrizabalaga

At £72m, Kepa is still the most expensive goalkeeper in history and he moved to Chelsea eight years ago.

He will be best (or worst) remembered for costing Chelsea two League Cup titles in comical fashion before taking his cursed gloves with him to blight Arsenal in the same competition, but perhaps most damning was his quite incredible inability to stop shots hit quite near him. It often felt as though he was getting out of the way.

Before him Chelsea had Petr Cech and then Thibaut Courtois, arguably the best goalkeepers of their respective generations.

Since him, they’ve had half a good season from Edouard Mendy to win the Champions League and then a whole load of calamitous dross from Robert Sanchez and his countless good-for-nothing backups.

We’re not saying it’s all his fault, but having been burned so severely by spending a big sum on a goalkeeper once, in a very out-of-character strategy since, Chelsea have looked to scrimp on stoppers and it’s shown.

8) Andriy Shevchenko

The tale Jose Mourinho tells – quite possibly a tall one – is that “I never wanted to sign Shevchenko”, whom Roman Abramovich was pushing the club to move for “because of his connections”.

Mourinho also admits that “I never told anyone I didn’t want to sign him”, which is something of a surprise as he’s never been shy of speaking his mind and leads us to believe this is all a fabrication to allow him to deliver the bombshell line in his Netflix documentary to have the audience all nodding along at his genius. “Do you want to know which player I wanted? Samuel Eto’o.”

Shevchenko was very nearly 30 when he arrived for what was a whopping £30m at the time, but had scored 28 goals for AC Milan in the previous season. But he never got going at Chelsea, with his best contribution arguably the way his arrival pushed Didier Drogba to hit his straps.

7) Fernando Torres

We all knew it wasn’t going to work. Torres looked half the player he had been at Liverpool for the six months before Chelsea spunked £50m on him, and the Spaniard very predictably failed to rediscover his spark at Stamford Bridge.

We’ll always have the Gary Neville ‘goal-gasm’ as he rounded Victor Valdes to score at the Nou Camp in the 2012 Champions League semi-final, though.

45 goals in 172 games for Chelsea tells you all you need to know!

6) Tiemoue Bakayoko

One of the many, many Monaco stars to be plucked from the Ligue 1 club after they stormed to the French title and reached the Champions League semi-finals in the 2016/17 season.

But while Fabinho, Bernardo Silva and a certain Kylian Mbappe went on to achieve extraordinary success elsewhere, Bakayoko never got close to reaching what many – not least Chelsea after paying £40m for him – thought to be his potential.

5) Adrian Mutu

Certainly starts like he was buzzing on something, scoring four goals in his first three Premier League games, but his form drifted from there, as he scored just a further two in his one full season at Stamford Bridge before testing positive for cocaine and being sacked by the club.

A disaster both on and off the field!

4) Mykhaylo Mudryk

Chelsea fans may still remember the joy of the Arsenal hijack and the excitement after that first appearance against Liverpool in January 2023. He was genuinely electric; a future Ballon d’Or winner, perhaps?

But regrets over the eight-and-a-half year contract he signed had set in long before his suspension for doping in December 2024. The difference in the trajectories of his career and that of equivalent 2022/23 rising star Khvicha Kvaratskhelia could not be more stark.

After a 15-minute cameo on loan at Tottenham this season followed by an eight-week injury lay-off, Chelsea can’t be holding out much hope of Spurs taking up their £75m buy option on the Ukrainian.

3) Romelu Lukaku

“I have supported Chelsea as a kid and now to be back and try to help them win more titles is an amazing feeling,” said returning hero Lukaku after his club-record £97.5m move from Inter Milan in August 2021, eight years after leaving Stamford Bridge.

His arrival was supposed to turn Thomas Tuchel’s Blues, fresh from winning the Champions League, into Premier League champions. A second debut goal against Arsenal and a brace in victory over Aston Villa in his third game back suggested that he was indeed the final piece of the puzzle.

But in December, after no further goals, albeit with injury and coronavirus keeping on the sidelines for some of the intervening time, Lukaku revealed he was “not happy” with his role under Tuchel in a bombshell interview with Sky Italia, in which he also revealed that “I really hope in the depths of my heart to return to Inter,”

And he did, after just one year back at Chelsea, as one of the most expensive mistakes in Premier League history.

2) Winston Bogarde

Having been signed by Gianluca Vialli on a free transfer from Barcelona in August 2000, Bogarde was out of the reckoning at Stamford Bridge just a month later when Claudio Ranieri arrived to replace his compatriot at the helm.

But the defender wasn’t for moving. He remained at Chelsea until 2004, when he retired from football, having made just 12 appearances for the club but while taking home the tidy sum of £40,000 per week.

“Why should I throw €15million [£13m] away when it is already mine? At the moment I signed it was in fact my money, my contract,” he later wrote on his biography. Fair point.

1) Danny Drinkwater

A ‘getting the band back together’ signing that never felt like it was going to work and didn’t, in spectacular fashion. After N’Golo Kante won the Premier League title alongside Drinkwater at Leicester, the Frenchman left for Chelsea to win the title again, before his midfield partner joined him at Stamford Bridge.

Drinkwater featured for a total of 521 minutes in the Premier League in his debut season and wasn’t seen again in Chelsea blue before leaving at the end of his contract after a series of unproductive loan spells in 2022, at which point he admitted “I wasted some of my best years.”

Last season photographed on a building site in one of those painful ‘you’ll never recognise this ex-Premier League star’ features that papers love to run; we’re not knocking it; good on him for pitching in and working so hard – just a shame it wasn’t on the football field instead.