Mauricio Pochettino claims Chelsea wanted to sell £60m signing before he became ‘the best in the Premier League’

Mauricio Pochettino has claimed that Chelsea planned to sell Marc Cucurella before he became ‘the best full-back in the Premier League’.

Cucurella joined Chelsea in a £63 million deal from Brighton in 2022 and struggled for consistency in his first two seasons at Stamford Bridge.

The 27-year-old was then one of Spain’s standout stars at Euro 2024 and went on to become one of the key performers in Enzo Maresca’s Chelsea side last season.

Cucurella continues to be a pivotal figure in Chelsea’s squad and Pochettino, who managed the Spain international for one season at Stamford Bridge, believes the dressing room environment has been key for the left-back’s development.

‘How the team finished playing, it is the credit of all these things we’ve spoken about, not because we are a genius in a tactical way, it’s because we create an environment that a player like Malo Gusto, who was really young and came from not to play from Lyon, finished playing his best,’ Pochettino said during an interview with the High Performance podcast.

‘Cucurella didn’t play from the beginning and the club wanted to sell, he became the best full-back in the Premier League.

‘Conor Gallagher, Enzo Fernandez, Cole Palmer, Noni Madueke, Jackson, plenty of players, Caicedo, they grew through all of this, this idea to build things in this emotional way, that is really, really key.’

Meanwhile, Pochettino’s assistant at Chelsea, Jesus Perez, was asked why Cole Palmer quickly established himself as a key player in the team following his £42.5 million move from Manchester City in 2023.

‘He has emotional intelligence above the average footballers,’ Perez said.

‘It makes him special. What he’s capable of doing with the ball is obvious but everything else you don’t see, how he assesses situations, how to behave, also because he is so young sometimes, he will make a mistake but when he made a mistake and it was challenged he had the capacity to accept it and to say, ‘I was wrong, sorry, it won’t happen again’, and that makes him great because he’s above average.’

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