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Nathaniel Chalobah: Why I had to leave Chelsea for Watford
It had been 12 years at the club, and six different loan spells, but come the summer Nathaniel Chalobah said that the time had come to walk away from Chelsea, where he has spent more than half his young life, to try something new.
The loan system has been worked by Chelsea to great advantage in recent years to develop its vast collection of talented young footballers but Chalobah, newly called up to the England senior team, said that for him it was time to find “somewhere to call home”.
Speaking at St George’s Park about his £5 million move to Watford, the 22-year-old said that he had reached a point where he could no longer wait for another first team chance at Stamford Bridge.
Since the age of 17 when he embarked on his first loan, a successful season with Watford, Chalobah had been on loan to Nottingham Forest, Middlesbrough, Burnley, Reading and then Napoli in the 2015-2016 season. He finally made his Chelsea competitive senior debut in September last year but the breakthrough to a more permanent place in the team never materialised and come this summer the number of young players leaving showed what Antonio Conte thought of their progress.
Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Tammy Abraham, Izzy Brown and Lewis Baker were among the young Englishmen in their late teens and early twenties who went back on loan. Dominic Solanke signed for Liverpool. The 20-year-old Ivorian winger Jeremie Boga departed to Birmingham City on loan this week. For Chalobah it was the option of a permanent move away that appealed more.
He said: “I had been on a few loans and back and forth. I was never really settled and for me it was more a case of trying to find somewhere to be really settled and try to find somewhere to call home. And I was finding it difficult to do that at Chelsea even though I was there for the whole season, and played a few games. So for me it was a hard decision, not easy, had to put a lot of things into consideration, but now I can say that it was a good decision.”
He admitted that the England senior call-up had come earlier than expected, after a summer in which he won the last of his 40 Under-21s caps at the European Championships. He is in the squad for the World Cup qualifiers against Malta on Friday and then Slovakia three days’ later. He says that he left Chelsea on good terms with the club and also with Conte but he is clear on his view of the chances offered to young players.
“There are a lot of good young English players. The average age for [those in] the Premier League did go up. I think it was 23 to be able to play at some of the clubs. Personally it is very difficult being young, it is a lot of pressure and clubs have to be brave to play young players. It's the only way to gain experience.”
Chalobah talked about the prestige of being at Chelsea and how that influences the decisions of young players, including, presumably, his younger brother Trevoh, 18, also an England junior international and still at the club. Nathaniel has 97 youth caps for England including the age groups Under-16s, Under-17s, Under-19s, Under-20s and Under-21s. Born in Sierra Leone, but choosing to play for England his international career has been as important to him as his club career.
If Chalobah does make his England debut over the next two games, he will be the first Watford player, excluding the on-loan Ben Foster in 2007, to represent the national side since John Barnes faced Brazil at Wembley in May 1987, a month before his move to Liverpool that summer.
“It’s a tough place Chelsea, top club, and I think that sometimes you can get a bit carried away with being there,” Chalobah said. “You are on the brink, on the brink, almost there, and it’s very hard when you have got established players who come in and they have got the experience already. In my situation or a youngsters’ situation if you don’t have the experience it is a lot harder to get into the team, so it was a matter of me judging the situation and seeing what the best options were.
“Yeah, it takes a lot. I think you have to really look deep into yourself and see what makes you happy. For me, I was at a top club and people were saying to me you are at Chelsea, you should stay at Chelsea, a big club, but for me that was not what the problem was. The problem was that I wanted to play, after getting a taste of it last year, I needed to go out and try and do better things for myself. So yeah, I think you really have to be brave, and sometimes decisions can be hard to make.”
Chalobah, Kieran Trippier, Phil Jones and Jake Livermore all missed Tuesday evening's training session but are expected to be available for the Malta qualifier. Jordan Pickford was sent home earlier in the day for treatment on an injury.