Now one of the stars at Chelsea after they spent a very large amount of money to buy him from Leicester City, Wesley Fofana knows that he has reached the top, or at least has come very close to it.
While he has been out injured of late, the defender has already shown a lot of promise during his time with the Foxes, and his season with Saint-Etienne’s first-team before that.
That’s why Leicester were prepared to pay €35m for him, and why they received €80.4m a couple of years later despite the 22-year-old spending most of one season on the sidelines with a fibula fracture.
He followed in the footsteps of William Saliba, who swapped the Ligue 1 side for Arsenal before him, and part of the reason why, other than playing in the Premier League, was to make sure his family were financially safe going forward.
This is what he told Vista in France, relayed by Poteaux Carrés, where he was brutally honest about his thought process when Leicester came knocking.
He said: “At Saint-Etienne, I hadn’t had a full season yet. Leicester arrive after the final against PSG. I’m still a little youngster. It wasn’t the time, I didn’t expect it. An offer arrives on the table, it’s an English club, there’s a good project and, financially, you can see that’s it, we’re going to say that there’s no longer any problem.
“I made a good living at Saint-Etienne, not going to lie, but at Leicester, you enter a new dimension, where you invest, you can buy house for your family, you can help everyone entirely. I mean really everyone: my close family, my friends, those who have been there since the beginning, who have helped me. Your job is done, you can rest now, I’ll take everything on my back.”
He might have been criticised for leaving too early, but there’s no denying the youngster proved himself quickly at Leicester, which is why he didn’t stick around for very long before bigger clubs came sniffing.
At the end of the day, he doesn’t care: “People take it how they want. It didn’t affect me that people said I only think about money. I’m a football player, it’s my passion, but it’s also my job. When you don’t have a father… it’s all on me. I’m the only hope. You say to yourself ‘if you say no and next you get injured, what happens?’
“’Ok, you’ll stay with your wages from Saint-Etienne, but if you get injured at Leicester, it’s not the same. You get injured with Leicester’s wages’. This is how you have to think… You can’t call me a mercenary.”
