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A number of big-money signings, promising talents and club legends are struggling to make their mark By Who Scored A £50m signing from Manchester City, Raheem Sterling was once a declaration of ambition by Chelsea but he is now lost in the £1. 4bn of talent that has arrived since. It is easy to forget that Sterling was the first of 50 signings under the club’s owners. He is a four-time Premier League champion who was England’s star player at Euro 2020 and could once be relied upon to score at least 10 goals a season. Today his role has been reduced to occupying a space in Chelsea’s so-called “bomb squad”, training away from the first team, on different pitches, at different times and with limited access to facilities. It is easy to sympathise with the Englishman; five managers have taken charge of Chelsea since his arrival and more than £500m has been spent on wingers – hardly the biggest vote of confidence. But don’t get too sentimental; Sterling is still reaping the benefits from the five-year, £325, 000-per-week contract he signed in 2022. It is a shame to see a 30-year-old with his talent exiled but he is unlikely to return while Enzo Maresca is in charge. Not long ago Axel Disasi was playing for France in the World Cup final. Now he is company for Sterling in the Chelsea bomb squad. Maresca’s arrival at the start of last season marked the beginning of the end for the £38. 7m signing from Monaco. It didn’t take the Italian manager long to make up his mind; 17 appearances in all competitions, just six of them in the Premier League, were enough for him to decide the defender was surplus to requirements. Poor one-on-one defending and a lack of composure on the ball sent Disasi to the back of the pecking order, behind the six other centre-backs in the squad. The nail in the coffin came in a 2-0 defeat at Ipswich last December, when the Frenchman gifted the hosts a goal with a careless pass. Disasi was benched for the next game against Wolves, featuring for 17 minutes, a cameo that remains his last outing in a Chelsea shirt. Once the unlikely saviour of Liverpool’s injury-ravaged defence, Rhys Williams has slipped so far from view that some fans might not realise he is still at the club. A shock starter during Liverpool’s injury-ravaged 2020-21 season, he went from a non-league loan spell with Kidderminster to Champions League nights in a matter of months, becoming a cult hero in the process. He was just 19 at the time and the world seemed to be opening up for him. Stepping in to fill gaps left by a defensive crisis that had wiped out Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joël Matip, Williams played 19 games for Liverpool that season, including six in the Champions League and nine in the Premier League, somehow helping Klopp’s side finish third in the league. But he disappeared as quickly as he arrived. Four seasons and five loan spells since his heroics and Williams is yet to make another first-team appearance, quietly slipping into the background at Anfield. Tyrell Malacia was presented as the first building block of Erik ten Hag’s rebuild when he joined Manchester United as a 22-year-old. Nearly four years later, he has only made 25 appearances in the Premier League. A promising talent who arrived from his childhood club, Feyenoord, spoke of “a new chapter, a new league and a tremendous manager” when he signed. But the optimism he brought to Old Trafford has long since faded. He played a key role in his debut season, making 39 appearances before picking up a serious meniscus injury that kept him out of action for 550 days. By the time he returned, United had changed considerably – new owners, new manager and a reshaped squad – and the young full-back who arrived with so much potential had largely been forgotten by fans. Despite picking up some much-needed game time out on loan with PSV last season, helping them lift the Eredivisie title, Malacia returned in the summer to find himself part of United’s own bomb squad. One by one his training partners – Marcus Rashford, Alejandro Garnacho, Jadon Sancho and Antony – departed for greener pastures, leaving Malacia as the lone survivor of the group. A solitary appearance on the bench against Brighton in late October offered a fleeting glimmer of hope for Malacia, but it seems unlikely he will play a significant role again. When Liverpool signed Fábio Carvalho from Fulham for £7. 5m in 2022, Jürgen Klopp described him as “a player who can bring a stadium to its feet. ” We’re yet to see much of that magic on the pitch. Carvalho was born in Lisbon before moving to London at the age of 11. He joined Balham FC, whose chairman, Greg Cruttwell, said “every club under the sun” was interested in recruiting him. He seemed to be fulfilling his early hype when he signed for Fulham and helped the club earn promotion to the Premier League, scoring 10 goals and providing eight assists in the 2021-22 season. The Liverpool deal took him to a new level. But his best spell in recent years was a 20-game loan spell at Hull in 2024. A lack of game time has been holding Carvalho back. Just 640 minutes (all competitions) in two seasons, the equivalent of 7. 1 full matches for Liverpool tells its own story. Seeking regular football, Carvalho joined RB Leipzig on loan in the 2023-24 season, but opportunities were scarce. He started just one game in the Bundesliga and returned to England early. A £27. 5m move to Brentford, a club renowned for developing players, promised time on the pitch and opportunities to grow, but Carvalho has started just four league games since joining at the start of last season and has played only 96 minutes this term. He is just 23, so his ceiling remains high, but he was dealt some cruel luck this week. Carvalho ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament last week in training and has been ruled out for the rest of the season. “It’s devastating for him, ” said Brentford head coach Keith Andrews. “Fábio knows he’ll get the support from everyone at the football club, including me, throughout this difficult period. ” Let’s hope he comes back stronger. Solly March is the second longest-serving player at Brighton after Lewis Dunk. Solly The English winger joined the club in December 2011, when Gus Poyet was their manager and Ashley Barnes was their top scorer. He has been a mainstay in Brighton’s squad since their promotion to the Premier League in the 2016-17 season, but fans have not seen him since a 62-minute appearance against West Ham in April – and that was his first start in 533 days after an ACL injury had kept him sidelined for 14 months. Speaking after that game in April, he said: “I think 90 minutes is probably still a few weeks off at least. Maybe next season. ” That moment of optimism was cruelly betrayed by a fresh knee injury days later. With just eight starts last season, injuries are quietly edging a Brighton legend out of the picture. This is an article by Who Scored