Chelsea’s five best prospects- Strikers top the list for the Blues

Tammy Abraham

Currently on loan at Swansea the young striker is the brightest star in the Chelsea academy.  Having won countless trophies at youth level and scored an unbelievably high amount of goals in the academy, 72 to be exact, before setting a record for goals scored by a teenager in the Championship while on loan lasts season when he plundered 26 for the cause at Bristol City, it is impossible not to acknowledge Abraham as a leader of the Chelsea youth movement.

The important thing about that particular goals record is that before he broke it Moussa Dembele, currently of Celtic, was the player who set it the year prior.  Dembele is now one of the most desired players in Europe and thought to be worth a minimum of 35 million pounds. By that logic, Abraham then who is younger is worth a similar amount of money.

For a team like Chelsea who are often struggling for good forward play to have a 30 million pound striker in their youth system is peculiar.

Abraham is such a well-rounded striker for his age it’s rather peculiar.  It tends to be at the youth level players have one very developed skill and hope to round out the rest of them by the time they’re fully fledged members of the senior squad.  That doesn’t appear to be the case for Abraham who is something of a combination of Thierry Henry and Didier Drogba.  At the moment he’s a little too skinny for top Premier League play and will need to add something between 12-20 pounds of muscle, particularly in the legs and core.

However like Drogba his straight line speed and ability to hold off players with his body provides him an excellent window with which to pick his finishes.  However, his finished are something more creative in a way that makes him different from the super-powered legendary and all-conquering Ivorian genius.  That then is where the Henry comparison is more honest in that Henry was a more well-rounded striker.  He could drift in and out of play and all over the field to stretch the defence.  Drogba was more central in the fact that he would maintain a bastion in the middle of the field where Henry was a roamer and left Bergkamp to the more traditionally tactical play while he hunted.