When he was appointed by Saint-Etienne to give advice to their recruiting team in 2015, David Wantier also kept his job as an agent.
During his time there, the Ligue 1 side made some good sales, including those of William Saliba and Wesley Fofana, now respectively at Arsenal and Chelsea, but their recruiting was sub-par.
The latter of the two defenders had a pit stop at Leicester City, who bought the centre-back from Saint-Etienne for over £30m in 2020, selling him to the Blues just under two years later for more than double their original investment.
It’s a transfer Chelsea seemed intent on making regardless of the money involved, and with the player also pushing for the move, the Foxes were left with little choice but to let him go.
However, his career could have been very different if Wantier is to be believed, as he revealed in an interview with Le Progrès.
He said: “We had just transferred Saliba to Arsenal. For Wesley Fofana, the year before his exit for Leicester, everyone wanted to sell him to RB Salzburg for €5m. I had to convince the president (Roland Romeyer) to keep him for an extra year. I told him we’d be naked defensively. He’s the only person who listened to me. Thankfully.”
Had Fofana ended up in Austria that year, who knows where he would be now? Would he have been on Chelsea’s radar? Would he have got his big move to a Champions League club this early in his career?
These are questions we will never get the answer to, but the Blues have him now, and that’s all they’ll be caring about, while Leicester made a healthy profit regardless.
