Callum Hudson-Odoi is facing a bleak future at Chelsea when he returns from a disappointing loan spell at Bayer Leverkusen this summer.
That’s according to Sky Sports Germany, who cover the player today and his failure to re-ignite his career in Germany this season.
They explain that Hudson-Odoi is ‘in the deep’ at Leverkusen, whom he joined on loan in the summer in the hope of regular playing time and kickstarting his career following a few disappointing years.
The signing initially ‘caused a lot of euphoria’ at Leverkusen as Hudson Odoi had once been labelled a ‘child prodigy’ in England and even courted by Bayer Munich for a long time.
Nobody at the latter will ‘shed a tear’ that the deal didn’t go through, though, because after six months at Leverkusen, ‘there is nothing left of the hype’ that once surrounded the Chelsea man.
It is now a fact he will return to Chelsea in the summer as the Werkself don’t have a purchase option in the loan deal and a permanent deal would have been ‘difficult to imagine’ from a financial point of view anyway. That was before his ‘sobering performance’.
Hudson-Odoi’s deal at Chelsea, which is worth €10-12m a year and runs until 2024, would have been impossible for the German side to match as well. They’re only paying half of that figure for the loan.
The belief is that the forward is ‘threatened with a bench or grandstand seat’ when he does return thanks to Chelsea’s business in January and last summer anyway. That means he ‘should have no future’ at Stamford Bridge beyond the summer.
He will need to move on and hope he can reignite things elsewhere following a ‘rather unsatisfactory’ spell with Leverkusen otherwise he will end up as a ‘former child prodigy’ and nothing more.