Chelsea are reported to be close to finalising a season-long loan for Brighton & Hove Albion attacking midfielder Facundo Buonanotte. Multiple outlets say the Club World Cup winners reached a swift agreement with the player and entered advanced talks with Brighton over the move.<\/p>\n
The Telegraph reported Chelsea had no intention of competing with Spurs for Xavi Simons, opting against a potential \u2018hijack\u2019 that has become common place in modern football. Fabrizio Romano states a full agreement has been reached between Chelsea and Buonanotte, who spent last season on loan at Leicester City.<\/p>\n
Leeds United had at one stage looked the most likely destination and had even booked a flight for a medical, according to The Athletic. Borussia Dortmund also expressed interest, but Brighton\u2019s preference remained keeping the 20-year-old in England so he can earn homegrown status in January.<\/p>\n
“Once Chelsea came calling, there was only one place the player wanted to go.”<\/p>\n
Buonanotte joined Brighton in Jan. 2023 from Rosario Central. He scored five goals in 50 appearances for Brighton before his loan to Leicester, who were relegated back to the Championship. He also has two caps for Argentina\u2019s national team.<\/p>\n
If completed, the loan would add Buonanotte to a sequence of players and staff who have moved from Brighton to Chelsea in recent years, following Jo\u00e3o Pedro, Mois\u00e9s Caicedo, Robert S\u00e1nchez and Marc Cucurella, as well as manager Graham Potter. Sky Sports estimate that as much as \u00a3287 million ($387 million) has been spent on signing players and staff from the Seagulls since the start of the BlueCo ownership era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chelsea close to a season-long loan for Facundo Buonanotte after choosing not to pursue Simons. Done<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2228,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[773,190,172],"tags":[786],"class_list":["post-2229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brighton-hove-albion","category-chelsea","category-epl","tag-facundo-buonanotte"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}