Keira Walsh joins Chelsea - why they need her now and the reason Barcelona let her go

Keira Walsh's dramatic deadline day move from Barcelona to Chelsea is headline news. Here's why

Keira Walsh’s signing was revealed on Friday. Credit: Chelsea Women

When it comes to football media, over the past half a decade, transfers have been the biggest business. Increasingly, the most popular journalists in the global game are those who can break transfer news. It has created a world within men’s football where every potential signing is reported in minute detail, with back and forth between “ITKs” (in the knows) who are competing to tell fans what the hell is going on. It is the perfect social media trend - one that encourages non-stop scrolling and the feeling you cannot miss the next twist in the transfer window tale.

This has taken some of the fun out of the transfer window though. It is hard to feel genuinely surprised about moves when the first tiny bit of interest is reported from 50 different angles, and every possible option has already been hotly debated. This is partly due to the saturation of the men’s football media market where many outlets are competing to get the most eyeballs, with transfer dopamine a perfect way to do it.

By contrast, the women’s football media market is not saturated, to put it mildly.

With far more limited resources and people working within the game, transfers feel more surprising with big deals often being reported only a couple of hours or days before they get done. It creates a different sense of time - long lulls where not much happens before sudden flurries of activity.

The women’s transfer market is also much smaller, which brings us to this - Keira Walsh in a Chelsea shirt.

In the final days of the window, Chelsea pulled off an audacious swoop for Walsh, persuading Barcelona to part ways with the England defensive midfielder who had six months left on her contract for a reported £440,000.

Not only does it mean that Chelsea spent a staggering (within the women’s game) £1.3million in January, it also has seen them strengthen in a key position to the detriment of their biggest European rivals.

For Barcelona, maybe this represents good business. They have recouped their original transfer fee for Walsh, what was at the time a world record, despite her only having six months to go on a deal and having no interest in signing a new one. Walsh was originally signed to be part of a reconfigured midfield following Alexia Putellas’ anterior cruciate ligament injury, but with Alexia now returned to full fitness and form, their best midfield has arguably returned to what it once was - Patri Guijarro, Aitana Bonmati and Putellas.

But the concern will be what this represents for Chelsea, who have been on the hunt for a ball-playing defensive midfielder for a number of years. The desire to recruit one has only been increased by the arrival of Sonia Bompastor, who predominantly played with a single pivot in her 4-3-3 at Lyon. So far under Bompastor, Chelsea have mainly used a double pivot of Erin Cuthbert and Sjoeke Nüsken.

For all that Bompastor liked to play in a 4-3-3 at Lyon, at Chelsea she has repeatedly emphasised a desire to be able to play in different systems. When asked about the club’s recruitment of Naomi Girma, rather than point to Girma’s own qualities, Bompastor focused on how having an extra centre-back would allow her to play a back three if desired. Walsh’s recruitment will give Chelsea a similar tactical string to their bow, being able to choose to play a single or double pivot.

The reality is Chelsea do not have a single player like Walsh. They brought in Oriane Jean-Francois from Paris Saint-Germain in the summer but the 23 year old is still returning to full fitness having spent almost a year out of football due to injuries. It is clear that Bompastor would not trust her to start the biggest games, which from a Chelsea perspective now, are the Champions League quarter-finals and anything that could come beyond that.

Walsh averages 8.79 progressive passes per 90, a number which will have benefited from playing in Liga F, where Barcelona totally dominate games and opposition sit off them. But even during her previous spell in the WSL with Manchester City, she averaged 7.9. Yui Hasegawa, City’s current playmaker, averages 6.84 and Sjoeke Nüsken and Erin Cuthbert, Chelsea’s current first choice midfielders, average 5.98 and 4.23. Put simply, adding Walsh to this Chelsea team means they will pass the ball forward from central areas far more than they do at the moment, where their full-backs are their main ball progressors.

There have been concerns around Walsh’s tendency to get marked out of games in an England shirt, and how this has limited their efficiency as a team but Chelsea should be well placed to deal with this given the variety of ball progression they have in place at the moment. Walsh is a profile that the team have been crying out for for a number of seasons, and Chelsea’s willingness to get her in January, on top of Girma, shows that this is a clear win now approach.

Obviously, whether Barcelona come to regret this will depend almost entirely on whether Chelsea do win now. On social media the optics of this transfer will boil down to one thing - who wins the Champions League? But beyond the next six months, Chelsea have also got a peak age player who is one of the best in the world in her position. At 27, there is a good chance she offers elite production for a minimum of three more seasons, allowing some of Chelsea’s younger players in the position to develop further. In a transfer window where lots of their rivals have looked indecisive, Chelsea’s ruthless commitment to bringing in the best continues to impress.