Official: Antonio Rüdiger Sold to Chelsea for €35M Plus Bonuses

Monchi, much like Little Finger, is a man known for working in the shadows, coldly calculating and manipulating people, bending them to his will. And whether they realize they’re being played or not, it doesn’t matter, nine times out of ten, Monchi emerges victorious, one step closer to capturing Sansa...I mean the Scudetto. Considering his preference to work in seclusion, the amount of digital ink dedicated towards Roma’s DS this past week has been quite odd. Incidentally, we’re T-minus seven days until GOT returns, so expect lots of references.

Monchi broke his relative silence this week, suggesting that Roma’s true transfer targets are those not mentioned in the papers, and that the time for sales has ended. Now we’ll cut him some slack and assume the Antonio Rüdiger to Chelsea transaction was not part of that mandate, presumably having been agreed to earlier in the week, but the timing is pretty ironic nonetheless.

So there you have it, Toni is officially a Chelsea player to the tune of €35 million up front with a potential €4 million in bonuses, which, if they have anything to do with cultivating social media traffic, Roma is golden. However, 10% of that sale price reportedly goes to his former club Stuttgart, which in and of itself doesn’t ruin the deal, but it is an important footnote. Also, as a quick aside, I’ve been covering Toni since he arrived in 2015 and only just noticed that he spells his name differently in his social media handles (Ruediger vs Rüdiger), interesting.

In any event, thus ends the Roma career of Antonio Rüdiger, which consisted of 72 appearances, two goals and one major knee surgery. In Toni, Roma have lost a tall, athletic, versatile and incredibly charismatic defender, one who will not easily be replaced, a problem confounded by Kostas Manolas’ rumored exit.

Nevertheless, getting close to €40 million for a player with his injury history was quite the piece of work by Monchi. Now we have to wait, see and hope that Monchi was true to his word, that now it’s time to build this squad rather pluck out its finest feathers one by one.